Back to work!

Sorry for disappearing on you!  I have a good excuse though, school was closed (and I was on vacation---a much needed vacation!)  The vacation is over (well, technically it has been over for a week now) and it is back to business--doing laundry, running errands, cleaning the apartment, and plenty of other mindless chores.  Getting back to work, however, has not been mindless.  I have to keep those kiddos busy or they will drive me crazy!

On top of the usual reading, writing, and arithmetic, we have been learning about matter.  Since I do not have science textbooks or kits in my classroom, I tend to pull resources from anywhere I can, which is exactly what I did for this week's lesson!

First off, I wrote these little poems for each of the states of matter.  I cannot take credit for them, I found them on a handout in my science files.

One student originally wrote "beer", but I thought that might not be the best thing to display in the classroom.  I asked her if she could think of a kid-friendly liquid.

We read them together and did a different activity with each.  For solids, I gave each child a magazine and they cut out all the solids they could find.  Since you can find a plethora of solids in any magazine, this activity did not take too long.  I glued their pictures onto the class poster.  Another option would be to have them each create their own solids poster.

For the liquids poster, I gave each child a notecard.  They wrote their name, and then drew and labeled something that is a liquid.  I taped the notecards around the poster.

Since gases are often invisible, I decided to do something that didn't require the kids to draw/find a picture.  We came up with a list of gases together and I recorded them and attached it to our poster.

Now the posters are displayed in the classroom so they can be used for reference as we continue our study of matter.

To increase the understanding of the fact that matter takes up space, we did a little experiment.  Once again, this is something I found in my old files.  However, this time I found out who to give credit to: Thanks Sue Boulais from MATTER REALLY MATTERS!

The directions suggest having the students work in groups, but since I only have 10 kids in my class we did it together.  I put water in a cup and drew a line to show where the water was.  Next, I had students take turns dropping different classroom items in the cup.  They observed the water rising above the line each time something was added.  Unfortunately, the items were small, so not much water was displaced.

In an effort to try and displace more water, we put several objects in at once.  (This was actually a suggestion from one of my kiddos!)  You can see that it worked!

As we added each item we discussed how the water rises because the objects take up space, hence, they are matter.  They also identified which kind of matter (solid, liquid, gas) and what material the objects were made of (plastic, wood, etc.)

The final step was to shine light into the cup to see if it is matter.  The kiddos predicted that light is matter.  I used my phone flashlight and they were able to see that their predictions were incorrect. Shining light on water doesn't make it do anything.  That is okay, everyone makes mistakes sometimes right!?

Now that we have learned the three states of matter, it is time to practice them a little more.  We will continue our adventures with matter this week, so stay tuned (and stay warm!).