Students conduct a simple test to determine how many drops of each of three liquids water, rubbing alcohol, vegetable oil can be placed on a penny before spilling over. Because of their different surface tensions, more water can be piled on top of a penny than either of the other two liquids. However, the main point of the activity is for students to come up with an explanation for their observations about the different amounts of liquids a penny can hold. To do this, they create hypotheses that explain their observations, and because middle school students are not likely to have prior knowledge of the property of surface tension, their hypotheses are not likely to include this idea. Then they are asked to come up with ways to test their hypotheses, although they do not need to actually conduct these tests as part of this activity.

The article provides an opportunity to do close reading of scientific language related to evolution and heredity in fourth grade science. There is also a diagram which can be reproduced in overhead, discussed, and recreated in simpler forms. Of the article, I would do the close reading portion with just the methods section of the article, having students first read it with an eye for unknown vocabulary, a second time, looking at sentences and rephrasing, and a third time to get the main idea. This process would be repeated, but with an eye first to students analyzing what information they can see in the graph, and making predictions of what they will find, and then the teacher showing both a bar graph and a pie chart with the same information. The conclusion of the article and the graph reading would be done in large group, with encouragement of discussions, partner to partner talk, and students changing their models of the 'big picture'.