Hi there! Have you ever thought about how amazing pencils are? With them, you can write stories, draw pictures, and even create art! Did you know some artists make tiny sculptures from the tip of a pencil? Isn’t that cool?
Matthew and Lily are curious about the other end of a pencil—the eraser! Let’s find out how erasers work. But first, we need to understand how a pencil works.
The tip of a pencil is made of something called graphite. When you write or draw, tiny bits of graphite stick to the paper. This is great because it keeps your words and pictures from blowing away or falling off the page!
Sometimes, we make mistakes and need to erase them. That’s where erasers come in! But how do they work?
Long ago, people used bread to erase mistakes. Bread was sticky enough to pick up pencil flakes but had its problems, like getting moldy. So, people found a better material: rubber! Rubber is soft and can rub off pencil marks without tearing the paper.
Rubber is special because when you rub it on paper, it gets warm and sticky. This stickiness helps pull the pencil flakes off the page. Sometimes, erasers have rough bits like pumice rock to help scratch and loosen the flakes, making it easier for the rubber to pick them up.
Today, erasers come in all shapes and sizes—like animals, desserts, and even your favorite characters! No matter what they look like, they need to be scratchy enough to loosen the pencil flakes, sticky enough to pick them up, and soft enough not to tear your paper.
That’s all for today! Thanks for joining Matthew and Lily on this adventure. Remember, there are mysteries all around us, so stay curious and keep exploring!
Make Your Own Eraser Experiment: Gather some bread and a small piece of rubber eraser. Try using the bread to erase pencil marks on a piece of paper, then use the rubber eraser. Which one works better? Why do you think that is? Discuss with a friend or family member what makes rubber more effective than bread for erasing.
Pencil Art Challenge: Use a pencil to draw a picture on a piece of paper. Then, use an eraser to create highlights or erase parts of your drawing to make a new design. How does using the eraser change your picture? Share your artwork with the class and explain how the eraser helped you create your masterpiece.
Observation Walk: Take a walk around your home or school and look for different types of erasers. Notice their shapes, sizes, and colors. Are some erasers better at erasing than others? Why do you think that is? Write down your observations and share them with your classmates.
Sure! Here’s a sanitized version of the transcript:
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Hi, it’s Jay! Have you ever thought about how cool pencils are? There are so many amazing things you can do with them, like writing stories and drawing pictures. You can even create art using a pencil itself! Check this out: artists have figured out ways to make tiny sculptures from the tip of a pencil. So cool!
Matthew and Lily are curious about the other end of a pencil—the part that helps us correct mistakes. Let’s give Matthew and Lily a call now.
Hi, Matthew! Hi, Lily! We have a question for you: how do erasers erase? That’s a great question! But before we answer it, we need to understand how a pencil actually works.
This is the tip of a pencil up close—the part that you write with. It’s made of something called graphite. When we write, tiny flakes of that dark graphite are left on the page, creating the pictures we draw and the letters we write. Those tiny flakes don’t just sit on top of the paper; they get stuck to it, which is a good thing. Can you guess why? If the tiny pencil flakes didn’t stick, our words would blow off the page in a breeze or fall to the floor if someone shook our desk. That would definitely be a bummer!
But sometimes, those stuck pencil flakes can be a problem, like when we make a mistake and want to start over. Luckily for us, we have erasers! Erasers can remove our mistakes from the page—poof! But how does that work?
Before I continue, I’m curious: how do you think erasers erase? Now would be a good time to pause the video and discuss.
Okay, ready? Let’s think about this a little. We know that the pencil flakes are stuck to the paper, so if we want to erase them, we need something that can loosen them. But what can loosen stuck pencil flakes without tearing the paper? Believe it or not, a long time ago, people used bread to erase mistakes! Yes, you heard that right—bread! It was kind of sticky, so it could pick up some of those pencil flakes off the page, and it was soft enough to rub off the flakes without tearing the paper.
However, using bread as an eraser had its problems. Can you guess what they were? For one thing, bread can fall apart and can get moldy and gross. What a mess!
Whenever we describe the things we can observe about something—like how big or small it is, or how sticky or soft it is—we’re talking about its properties. From what we can observe, bread has some properties that work well as an eraser and some that definitely don’t. People had to find a better material to erase, and eventually, they figured out just the right thing. Can you guess what it is? It’s rubber! The same material that bouncy balls and tires are made of. Rubber actually got its name from how well it can rub mistakes off of paper.
Most of the erasers we use today are made of rubber. Rubber is soft, so it doesn’t rip the page when you erase, and it has a special property that makes it great at pulling tiny pencil flakes off the page. Do you want to know what that property is? Rub your hands together really quickly like this. Do you feel them getting warm? That heat helps an eraser work! When you rub your eraser on the paper, it gets warm too, and that heat makes the rubber sticky. So sticky that the tiny pencil flakes on your paper stick to it and get pulled off the page. You can actually see the dark pencil flakes the eraser has picked up after you erase.
But stickiness alone can’t remove all the flakes. Some of them are really stuck and need to be scratched free from the paper before the eraser’s stickiness can work. One solution was to add rough and scratchy ingredients to the soft rubber, like ground-up pumice rock. Adding rough and scratchy materials to erasers helps scrape up and loosen the stuck pencil flakes, kind of like sandpaper. That way, the stickiness of the rubber can pick them up off the page.
Oh, and you know those dark pieces of eraser on your paper after you erase? Those are the tiny pencil flakes stuck to the pieces of rubber from your eraser. Pretty cool!
There are all sorts of erasers today—erasers shaped like animals and desserts. There are even erasers shaped like your favorite characters! It doesn’t really matter what they look like; what’s important is that they have the right properties. They need to be scratchy enough to loosen the pencil flakes from your paper, sticky enough to pick them all up, and soft enough not to rip your page.
That’s all for this week’s question. Thanks for asking it, Matthew and Lily! We’ll be back with a new episode in a couple of weeks. In the meantime, here are some older questions from the question jar that you can vote on for next week. You can choose from: Why don’t all trees lose their leaves in the fall? Who invented football? Or what’s that red thing on a turkey?
So submit your vote when the video’s over. We want to hear from all of you watching! There are mysteries all around us. Stay curious, and see you next week!
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