What's The Matter?

To kick off our unit on solids and liquids in science, we started talking about matter. We learned that matter is anything that takes up space. We brainstormed many things that are matter: chairs, cabinets, books and even US! 

We also discovered that the three states of matter (solids, liquids and gases) can change. Today we did an experiment to see how we could get snow to change from a solid into a liquid. 

First we collected snow from outside! 

Then we thought of ways to make it melt. We discovered that we had to make the snow warm to make is melt into a liquid. Students tried putting their little bottle of snow under warm water or under a light. They even used body heat to make it melt! I saw some friends breathing on their bottle of snow to make them melt as well. Such smart thinking!

We tried many different ways to make our matter sample change and it worked! We ended up with liquids at the end of our experiment!