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Students Flying High With Air Pressure Lesson
students doing an experiment

First grade students on the Bolles Lower School Whitehurst Campus learned about air pressure this week during their science lessons in Karen Stephens’ and Jill Bobbitt’s classrooms. The experiment, known as “The Bernoulli Bag,” challenged students to discover how many breaths it takes to fill a 8-foot plastic bag. Their initial findings showed it is extremely difficult to fill a bag that large with breath. However, they learned if the bag is held horizontal and away from them and the bag opening is sideways, the bag inflates much more easily.

Stephens and Bobbitt learned the lesson during a summer fellowship at “Science in the Rockies with Steve Spangler,” where they learned many fun and exciting ways to teach kids about science.

So how does “The Bernouli Bag” experiment work? Here’s how: “The bag quickly inflates because air from the atmosphere is drawn into the bag along the sides of the stream of air from your lungs. For you science types out there, it goes like this. In 1738, a scientist named Daniel Bernoulli observed that a stream of moving air is surrounded by an area of low atmospheric pressure. In fact, the faster the stream of air moves, the lower the pressure drops around it. When you blow into the bag, you create an area of low pressure inside the bag. Higher pressure air around you in the atmosphere rushes into the bag to equalize things. In other words, air in the atmosphere is drawn into the bag at the same time you’re blowing into it as long as the opening of the bag is not on your mouth.”

It's all about air pressure. And because the lesson was fun, students will have no pressure recalling it throughout their life.

 

student experimenting
student experimenting
students experimenting
students experimenting
students experimentin