Tallest
Tower

Seventh grade
science project
(Science Lab #4)

New Hope Academy


During our first quarter, seventh graders studied ancient peoples and their structures, including Native American burial mounds and British stone henges.

In the Eastern part of what is now the United States, archaeologists have discovered rich evidence of ancient cultures inside thousands of earthen mounds. Scholars call the Native Americans who created these mounds the Mound Builders.

The best-known Mound Builders cultures are the Adena (1,000 B.C. - A.D. 200), the Hopewell (300 B.C. - A.D.700) and the Mississippian (A.D.600 - A.D.1500).

Stonehenge is a megalithic monument on the Salisbury Plain in England, about 85 miles southwest of London. It consists of a ditch and bank surrounding huge stones, many weighing between one and 45 tons. The stones are arranged in circle and horseshoe patterns, with a lane connecting the monument to the nearby River Avon. It is believed that construction began around 3,000 B.C. and continued until about 1,100 B.C.

Seventh graders are required to maintain a Lab notebook that includes notes on a general format for labs, as well as their completed lab work.

The general lab format is as follows:

1. Title

2. Purpose / Problem / Hypothesis

3. Materials / Equipment

4. Procedure

5. Data

6. Observations

7. Analysis

8. Conclusion / Summary / Results

9. Sketch / Diagram

Students were grouped into teams, given only the simplest of materials: four pieces of newspaper and ten inches of tape. Armed with their minds they had about forty minutes to build like builders build!

For the 2006 class, the tallest free-standing tower reached a glorious height of 43.5 inches!!!




NEW HOPE ACADEMY: An international private school in PG county, MD