ELA Component

Bubble Suspension:

ELA Component: Option 3 Narrative Essay

My PBL project is Bubble Suspension and involves the principle of the surface tension of water , which deals with how difficult it is to break the surface of water. For the ELA component of my project, I will be doing a narrative essay, which is option 3, and it will be presented on this website. I have chosen this option, because surface tension is a principle that can be observed easily by anyone on any day. Therefore, through a narrative, I can present this common principle in a way that shows how it is connected to our human lives. This will also allow me to connect with others and others to relate to me, which will further enhance our understanding of surface tension.

The Essay:

We had just arrived exhausted in Immit, my mother’s village, located deep within the mountains of northern Pakistan. To get there, we had to travel by plane to Karachi, Pakistan for eighteen hours, fly to Islamabad, Pakistan for two and a half hours, drive to Gilgit, Pakistan in sixteen hours, and finally drive to Immit within four hours. After all that traveling within the course of about two weeks, we—my mom, my sister Sitara, and I—finally arrived in my mom’s beloved village, one of my most favorite places on Earth. By now, I have been there about seven times, but for this particular instance, this was my second or third time there—I was just five years old.

Naturally, we would rest after such extensive travel, but being a hyper little imaginative girl, my toddler mind demanded play. Shortly after arriving, we visited my mom’s uncle’s house, just a five minutes’ walk away from our house. My mom’s cousins were also there, but one of them was a girl named Iram, who was just a year older than me. Together, Iram, Sitara, and I set out to explore the wilderness located just outside of her house. Iram actually had an artificial circular pond in front of her house, about four feet in diameter, used primarily to wash clothes by hand. It was probably around three feet deep. Anyways, my five-year-old mind was intrigued by the pond, and soon I had concocted the idea to “cook” something delicious up in the pot-like pond. I found a nice long stick and gathered my “ingredients”—which ranged from fresh apricots to flowers to grass. One by one, I gently added in my ingredients and mixed the soup with my stick.

Soon, one of the apricots caught my eye—it was floating, bobbing around in the water. This irked me, so I took my stick and tried to push the apricot towards myself. Being a five-year-old, I was not that tall, neither were my arms that long. I could barely reach the other side of the four-foot-wide pond, and that’s exactly where the apricot was bobbing around. I extended myself as much as I could—but in the next few seconds, I found myself underwater.

I had fallen into the pond and started flailing around, splashing the water all around me. Arms reached down to grab me, and soon I was out of the water, in a new outfit, draped in a towel, drinking tea. It was in the middle of July, yet I was shivering from head to toe in the mountainous climate. Wood was brought in to build a fire to help warm my soaked body. Not until then did everyone relax and realize the comic ridiculousness of the whole situation: a five-year-old American girl accidentally fell into a small pond. Of course, no one would understand exactly why I was messing around a miniature pond: I was just employing my imagination to have fun.

I realize now that surface tension is applicable to this anecdote. Surface tension is a water quality that describes just how difficult it is to break the surface of water, and it results from water molecules’ attraction to one another. In my case as a 5-year-old, it was not that difficult to break water’s surface, and I had to learn that the hard way. However, some of the ingredients I had mixed into the “pot” of water could not break through. For example, the grass pieces floated on top of the water. As a result of this experience, I learned that surface tension is not strong enough to hold me, even as a 5-year-old.

Part of Immit The small "pond" in 2012--its dimensions have slightly

changed since 2002, which is when this story took place