As part of the skeleton unit the children had to work in groups of three to design something that would protect an egg. Then the eggs were then dropped 10 meters out of a window onto concrete to see if they would break or not. Out of 28 eggs, 12 eggs survived the fall. The rest ended up scrambled! If you would like to see the winning designs, that protect the 12 eggs that survived, they are on display in the fourth grade pod.

The real message behind this activity was for the children to understand how fragile our brain is. To help teach us a little bit about how our brain works Dr. Mitchener, a brain surgeon at King's Cross hospital in London, and parent of two ACS pupils, came and spoke to the whole fourth grade. She had a model of the brain, which she used to explain what the different parts of our brain do.

The fourth graders had a lot of fun, and hopefully they learned an important lesson: Wear your helmet when you ride your bike - remember you only have one brain so protect it!

Nathan Malone a 4th grade student describes his egg dropping experience -

“The 4th graders and I have gone past the ‘eggstreme’ in learning about the human skull and brain. So, we have tried to save eggs from a breaking fall just like falling off your bike. Everyone put layers of protection and some added parachutes to the raw egg. After the eggs were dropped out the window, we checked them to see if they were broken but only 2 out of the 5 groups in my class failed - but I will not mention any names! Even so, congratulations to all of the group’s whose egg survived the death defying fall and I understand everyone did their best in trying to save the egg. In this experiment the egg was mimicking the human skull and we were trying to save the (small) “skull and brain” from a fall from Mr. Den Hartog’s window. Ouch!! That’s got to hurt!”