Marvelous Matter

We wrapped up our matter unit today! I think I saw some tears. Haha! The first and second graders looooove matter.... it's a little strange, but I'm down.

So here are a few more things we did this week!

Yesterday, we played Matter Scoot! I saw this activity on a few people's blogs so I tried it out. If you've never played before, I will fill you in! On each kid's desk there should be a question (or task) and a number. You give the students a paper with an answer space for each numbered desk, and they move from desk to desk filling in their answer sheet. For my matter scoot game, the students looked at pictures and had to write whether the object in the picture was a solid, liquid, or gas and a property of the object.

They looooved this! I even took a video for you!

Today we took our end-of-the-chapter test. Part of it was the traditional paper-and-pencil situation (which they all did amazingly on!), and another part was completing a states of matter foldable.

They did well with this! I asked them to cut out 3 solids and 3 liquids and just try to find a gas. If they couldn't find one, they were allowed to draw a picture and label it. They had a good old time. I didn't grade these yet but based on my circulation around the room... I think they all rocked it. :)

And I'll leave you with something cute. As I said yesterday, we had indoor recess for both the morning and lunch recesses. At lunch recess, since it's almost 30 minutes long, we do Adventure to Fitness, but in the morning I let them do whatever. I have some games or they'll play on the geoboards.

Anyway, 3 of the kids came up to me during recess and said, "Look! We made solid, liquid, and gas out of legos!!"

The big white part is ice. There is a little blue because it's melting a little bit, haha. The big blue part is water. The little white part is a chimney with air coming out of it! We had just talked about how the heating or cooling can change the state of matter, so this really made my day!!

Learning With Snow

I am realizing that everything I've talked about lately in my blog has concerned snow ......... it's hard to ignore.

Good news though - today was our first day of indoor recess!! Perhaps because the wind chill was below zero. I did Adventure to Fitness WITH the kids today, instead of working on other stuff, and it is quite the workout!!!!

Yesterday, I was scheduled to teach about changing states of matter through heating or cooling. My science book suggested freezing water overnight, recording the temperature in the morning, and then re-recording it throughout the day to show what happens when matter is heated.

Instead, we did the same demonstration with snow!! We definitely have enough of it.

I found 4 thermometers in my room, so I got out 4 cups and went out to recess with the kids (in the 10 degree weather..............) to collect our specimens. They packed the snow up to the top but by the time I took this picture, it was allllll water.

Then we recorded the temperature. I meant to check it on a regular basis but it totally slipped my mind so we just wrote it down every so often. Please note the strange variation in temperatures between the 4 cups... How did one get to 50 and one was only 25?? And I double-checked the thermometers! 

I'd like to leave you with a pair of sad pictures.

Here was the temperature in my car on my drive home today.

And here was the temperature in our classrooms........ that's a 61, people.

It's so weird - 61 feels amazing when you're outside in the sun. But inside your classroom in the middle of January, it's like being in a freezer.