Saving Captain Blackbeard
After a failed attempt, could Science hold the answer for Year 2 students as they try to save Captain Blackbeard?
The children of Year 2 had some unfinished business to attend to recently. At the very start of Term 2A, the students were sent an S.O.S by ‘Captain Blackbeard’. He was marooned on a desert island and needed their help. The island had been badly littered so he asked the children to use this rubbish (materials such as plastic, foil, paper and cloth) to design a raft for him. The students designed and built their rafts before Captain Blackbeard tested them in the pool. Sadly, they were an unmitigated failure…….and the Captain got well and truly soaked!
In their subsequent Science lessons, the children learned all about the different properties of materials and why certain things float. They carried out investigations to understand concepts such as density and buoyancy and then applied this new knowledge to their second attempt at creating a more “robust” raft for Captain Blackbeard. Thankfully, when we returned to the scene of our previous failure, every single ’newly-designed’ raft carried the grateful Captain safely to dry land.
