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.