Sound & Hearing

The kids were all EARS today while we learned about our sense of hearing! We started the morning with our usual letter practice before reading a book all about hearing. We learned that sometimes when people can't hear well they have to wear a hearing aid. We talked about the basic parts of our ears (outer, ear canal, and ear drum) and then we got to pretend to be a giant ear, ear canal, and ear drum while one friend pretended to be the sound. We took turns vibrating, just like sound vibrates through the air to our ear drums. Miss Nicole showed us a short video that she made with her second grade students all about sound and hearing.

We had two science experiments this morning: ear drums and glitter dance. First, we used paper towel tubes to simulate our ear canals and we covered one end with plastic wrap to be our ear drums. When we talked really loud or really close we felt the plastic wrap "ear drum" vibrate more than when we talked really soft or farther away. Some of us tried talking through our ear canals without an eardrum and we noticed that we didn't feel a vibration.

Can you see the glitter?

_We also experimented with paper cups that had plastic wrap across the tops. We put glitter on top of the plastic wrap and watched what happened when we talked down to the cup.....the glitter danced!! The sound from our voices made the glitter dance on our cups!

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We made bell bracelets with different sizes of bells.

Our bells were louder or quieter depending on how big they were!

In the afternoon we learned about animal sounds and read Polar Bear, Polar Bear, What Do You Hear? by Eric Carle. We drew pictures of what we can hear, made animal ear headbands, and tried to identify what animal sounds we heard from a special animal sounds application.