Secret Messages at Different Ages
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Secret Messages: Early Elementary Schoolers
Creating and de-coding Secret Messages can be a fun science activity for people of all ages. We provide these generalizations as guidelines about what children at different ages might do during Secret Message explorations at the Discovery Center’s Experiment Station, at home in your living room, or at school. Listed below are science and technology process skills that children may be practicing during their explorations. Please remember: each child develops at a different rate, so some children in each age group may be able to do some of the things described in the age group before or after their own.
How might early elementary schoolers explore Secret Messages?
Experiment– Early Elementary Schooler
Early-elementary-aged visitors can test different combinations of wax, paper and paint and determine which combinations they think are best.
Adults can help children at this age to make good experiments by guiding them to come up with a research question, making a “hypothesis” (a guess about what they think might happen), and then changing only that one aspect that they are looking at and keeping all other variables the same.
Try this sample experiment!
Using two different waxes (for example: a crayon and a colored pencil), conduct an experiment to find out which wax works best.
Research Question: Which wax comes out the clearest after you reveal it?
Hypothesis: Ask your child to make a guess about what will happen, like: “Crayons will come out more clearly than colored pencil after your reveal it with paint”.
Method: On the same piece of paper, draw a single line using the crayon and a single line using the colored pencil. Using the same paint color in one stroke, reveal the lines and help your child observe which wax is most clearly revealed
Now try to design your own, different experiment!
Observe – Early Elementary Schoolers
Early-elementary aged children can think of other places they have seen or used wax and paper.
They can describe how using wax might help solve a problem, such as sealing cracks in a boat or keeping food from getting wet, and try to relate this to how the Secret Messages are revealed.
Use Tools and Materials- Early Elementary Schoolers
Early-elementary-schoolers can notice more complex differences between the materials in a category, such as the pliability of the wax or the porosity of the paper. They can vary the pressure they apply to the wax when drawing and observe how this affects the quality of the secret message.