Moving Matter

 Today's matter lesson was on physical changes. Going from a gas to liquid to solid and back. Well in about two paragraphs they throw particles, freeze, condense, melt, evaporate, all at my poor little children who are just now learning solid, liquid, and gas. I'm sitting there as we read and discuss and I'm slightly confused. My kids are confused. We need some concrete here. Not the concrete to bang your head against either. 

Step 1: Particles.  We talked about how particles make up everything and they are so tiny we can't see them. 

Step 2: Moving Particles. I had my students show how particles move in different states with their hands. 

First we showed how solids have particles that don't move a lot because our hands are clasped tightly and when they are squeezing together they really don't get to move. Liquid particles slide past each other and gas particles are just crazy messes that go everywhere. They really like gas particles because they got to fling their hands around like crazy people. 

Step 3: Changing States of Matter. My kids needed to know what it meant that things were melting. How does that change things? Everyone stood behind their chair and I turned the lights off. We didn't have energy. We were a solid and our particles didn't move much so we stood still. I turned on one light switch (we have 2 total) and that was us adding energy. As we add energy those particles start to move and that solid changes state. My kids started walking around the room slowly. We talked about the state that moves slowly (liquid). We talked about how our physical change was like ice (solid) becoming water (liquid) and we call that melting. I know that's a lot of info but our science book tried to do four changes in two paragraphs. Talk about a lot. 

So once we were good with those states and melting. I flipped the second light switch. Now we were adding even more energy and if we have even more energy what happens...that is exactly how I worded that. Can you imagine what happened? Yep. Furiously moving bodies everywhere. We became their favorite thing ever. Gas. They knew they were a gas. They've got that down. Now we talked about liquids changing to gas and how that is evaporation. 

Step 4: Do everything backwards. I thought that was enough for my kids today so next week we will review and then jump into going backwards from gas to liquid to solid and talk about condensing and freezing. We will run around like crazy gas particles, condense into liquid, and freeze into a solid. I'm hoping that makes things make a little more sense to my kids and they get out some energy at the same time.