Battery and Gum Wrapper: Science Experiment

Today I did a video science experiment for my students and it was a lot of fun. If you’ve never done the battery with a gum wrapper it can be a tad tricky to figure it out at first. Luckily, I did all the hard work for you by going to two stores and buying a life time supply of gum for myself.

The result was that Big 5 gum wrappers worked the best. I am not going to lie, I didn’t try every one once I found the Big 5 is what was used to start a fire in this YouTube video. I just trusted it would do the job after 2 failed gums by Extra and Air Heads.

I started out this science experiment by doing a read aloud via screen castify of All Charged Up by Jennifer Boothroyd that you can find on Get Epic. You will need an account but it’s free :)

I read this before doing the experiment to expose my students to some of the academic terminology and to have them be thinking about electricity in general. If we were in class we would have done this much more detailed. Since I only see them once every thirty minutes and post items for them to do on google classroom, this seemed like the best way to do it.

I then video taped myself doing the experiment with a whiteboard that showed the key words and tools I used. I used a few terms from the book when explaining what we were doing and showed them all of the items I was using.

My only advice if you do this experiment is to maybe use some type of gloves because the wrapper does get super hot! I hope this gave you a fun way of how you can incorporate a science experiment into your virtual learning.

Happy Teaching :)