Wednesday, December 19, 2012

Particleboard and Plywood

In yesterday's blog, I told you we would be doing something cool with our wood shavings and sawdust.  Well, we did.  We made particleboard.

Particle board is made of lots of small pieces (or particles) of wood, such as wood shavings and sawdust and a glue called resin.  We made the resin out of water and cornstarch.  It looked liked mashed potatoes.  Mrs. Kurt gave each of us a handful of the resin.  We had to knead it to make it smooth like play dough.  Next we put the resin into a cup with wood shavings and sawdust and used a craft stick to mix it.  It was pretty exciting to see how the wood mixture stuck to the resin.





Then came the fun part...we dumped out the mixture on to a paper plate and formed our particle board. We actually came up with some interesting shapes and made kind of a big mess.  But it was OK because we all helped to clean up.




After we finished the particleboard, we made plywood.  We glued three thin pieces of wood together to give us an idea how plywood is made.  We put both of our new wood samples out in the hall to dry and we completed three pages in our Science notebooks!





Hopefully you had a chance to see our wood samples.  Be sure you ask us about them!


Granny Goose visited today as well.

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