Middle School Inquiry Lab on Elements of Earth
In this lab students will build a model to demonstrate the major elements that comprise solid earth, living matter, oceans, and atmosphere.
Each inquiry lab will contain an essential question that will drive the lesson and make students think. For this lesson, the essential question is:
- Which elements comprise the largest portions of Earth’s spheres?
BACKGROUND INFORMATION AND MATERIALS LIST:
Students will begin the lab by reading the essential question and background information. This can be done individually, as lab groups, or as a whole class. If you consider lab groups, you also might include some type of whole class formative checks before digging into the lab.
Materials List:
- 6 250 mL beakers
- 4 100 mL graduated cylinders
- teaspoon
- stirring rod
- pipets or syringes
- warm water
- food coloring (in red, yellow, blue, green, orange, and purple)
- sugar
- sticky notes
- colored pencils to match food coloring
PROCEDURE:
Students will have to use the six 250 mL beakers and fill with specific colored water in each one. Students will then be directed to add a specific amount of sugar to each beaker which will change the density of the substances. Using tables representing the four spheres of Earth, students will use one graduated cylinder to model for each sphere. The tables will instruct the students exactly how much liquid to add to each graduated cylinder and in what order to place the colored liquids. Once completed, students will be able to get a visual representation of how much of each element makes up the four spheres and which elements are the most abundant on Earth. Students will finally take the information from the tables and create a bar graph displaying the percentage of elements for each sphere by using colored pencils and adding a key.
CONCLUSION
Students will go back to the essential question and write a CER (Claim, Evidence, Reasoning) to conclude the lab. Once completed, students will reflect back on their learning by answering the following questions:
- What element has the highest percentage across the most spheres? Why does this make sense?
- When you look at the entire Earth, the most abundant element is iron yet it barely shows up in the four spheres. Where is iron probably located?
MODIFIED AND INDEPENDENT INQUIRY VERSIONS
All of the Kesler Science inquiry labs come with three different modification levels. Each lab is differentiated using the icons below.
STANDARDS ALIGNMENT
TEKS: 6.5B – Recognize that a limited number of many known elements comprise the largest portion of solid earth, living matter, ocean, and atmosphere.
