Dear Families,

Thank you all so much for letting us work on a science investigation with your children. We
worked as a class and in small groups to investigate the topic of ramps. We started with an EKWQ chart
in our hook activity to gain knowledge of what the students know about ramps. EKWQ stands for
Experiences with ramps, Knowledge about ramps, Wonders about ramps, and Questions about ramps.
We choose to do the investigation on ramps because the children showed interest in the topic of ramps
as they were building them in the block area on our first day in the classroom.
Our first experience with the children was to take a walk around the school and go on a ramp
hunt. In this activity we walked outside and around the school to look for ramps of different styles and to
see what they are used for in real life at the school. We found that there are ramps on the sidewalks, in
the parking lot and on the playground. On the playground we found that there are different types of
textures on the ramps to make them useful for playing. We took pictures of the ramps that we found and
we used them in the second experience.
Our second experience was to dive deeper into the concept of ramps and ramp textures. We
worked with foil, bubble wrap and sandpaper to experience the textures that we encountered at the
playground on the ramp hunt. The foil represents the slides and the sandpaper represents the ramps up
to the slides and the bubble wrap represents the sidewalk ramps. When we worked with the textures in
the classroom we connected the textures with the pictures we took on the walk so that the children could
build their knowledge and recall about ramps. We used a ball to roll up and down the ramps with the three
textures so that the children were able to feel the friction of the textures and connect with the uses of the
textures on ramps in real life.
The third experience we did with the children was to create body ramps. For this activity the
children worked in pairs and were able to make ramps with their arms and use different inclines (angles)
on their arms with different styles of balls to see what balls goes fast, and what balls go slow, based on
the arm incline.
To wrap up our investigation the children were able to build and explore ramps again with the
added textured ramps and other long flat blocks to make their own ramps during their choice time at the
end of the school day.
The children learned the words: gravity, friction, incline, and texture during our investigation.
Please enjoy a few pictures from our investigation below!

Wishing the best,

Emily and Meagan