The Science Behind Smoking (Module 5)

Additional Activities

Below are some activities that can be used after completion of the fifth mission. These activities are extensions to many other areas of the curriculum.

1. You may want to perform the following demonstration to illustrate how dangerous smoking can be.

• Take a plastic soda bottle with a top. Puncture a hole in the top just big enough for a cigarette.
  
• Light the cigarette and place the lit end on the outside of the bottle, with the filter end inside. Make sure the bottle is sealed tightly.
  
• Squeeze the bottle 25 times, simulating smoking. Try to keep the squeezes as uniform as possible. Have the students watch as smoke fills the bottle.
  
• After you are done squeezing, let the bottle sit for about 20 minutes. Then have students observe the bottom of the bottle. They will see dark residue, which is similar to what builds up in the lungs of smokers.
  
• Discuss with the class what this demonstration illustrates about cigarette smoking.
  

Note: During this demonstration, smoke and its odor fill the room. To minimize the deleterious effects, you might want to do this activity outside.

2. Have each student create a new trading card to go with this module. The card can be on any aspect of smoking or addiction.

3. Go to the Library/Media Center and do some research about the effects of smoking on people’s health. Students may look in books, in magazines, or on Web sites. Have students write a paragraph describing the research they found.

4. Have students go to another second- or third-grade class in the school and teach this lesson to those students. Have the students take the lead in helping the students from the other class set up the experiment, perform the experiment, and draw conclusions from it. Discuss whether the second class reached the same conclusions as the first one did.