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This morning's papermaking activity helped me to appreciate the automated machinery that we use today.  It's amazing how some simple machines can produce paper of uniform thickness and uniform quality continuously. In both places the machinery involves a belt that picks up the raw pulp as it moves through a slurry.  Then it moves over a vacuum, which sucks out most of the water.  I think the belt then moves through an oven, which provides the final drying.

Though I think that this activity might be useful in the earlier grades, most of my kids have been exposed to papermaking by the time I get them -- either at the FI or at the Ben Franklin House (or museum) in Society Hill.  At the FI kids can watch the process from pulp to dry paper and then try to make their own piece of paper to take home.  Using a vacuum belt and a heat lamp the process can be completed fairly quickly.  I think the museum papermaking provides no "hands-on."  But you can buy some of the product.

As for my classes, I think I can use the questions on what a tree is made of and even possibly the leaf disc photosynthesis lab.  It would give the kids a concrete experience of the theory that they have been hearing for so long.