Clay itself sinks, but clay boats float. Why? Young engineers build clay boats to learn about buoyancy. They test the weight the boats can hold using washers and then tweak their designs to make improvements, following the engineering...

Clay's as good a material as any to build a boat, right? An introductory lesson sets the stage for two activities associated with buoyancy. The first involves building boats out of clay, while the second uses these boats to measure the...

Eureka! Using the clay boats made in the previous lesson, learners investigate the idea of buoyancy and water displacement to finish the last installment of five in a Floaters and Sinkers unit. Their observations during the activity...

Whatever floats your boat. Young engineers learn about density by measuring the masses and volumes of boxes filled with different materials. Using their knowledge of densities, they hypothesize whether objects with given densities will...

Swimmers know to float by turning their bodies horizontally rather than vertically, but why does that make a difference? In an interesting activity, scholars explore buoyancy and the properties of air and water. They test cups to see...

Fifth graders define density as the amount of mass per volume a material contains, compare the densities of several types of materials, especially those that sink in water compared to those that float. They use two different methods to...