Freeze & Melt

Our science focus for the month is temperature. 

Today we explored it through the freezing and melting properties of water/ice.  

Oh no! Look! Yellow and Red Bears are frozen in the ice!

How did they get there?

How will we get them out?

We remembered that ice starts out as water that gets super cold
so the bears must have been put in the water before it froze.

We brainstormed lots of ways to get them out.
The most popular involved some sort of busting-up action :) 

Hit them with a hammer! 

Throw them at the wall! 

Throw them on the floor super hard! 

My personal favorite: Put them on the track of a speeding train--it will smash the ice and turn it back into water! 

Then we remembered that for the water to turn to ice, it had to get super cold--

so we could warm them up! 

We brainstormed ways to do this too-- 

Put them in the oven! 

Put them in the microwave! 

Put them out in the sun! 

Feed them to the baby! :)

We tried an experiment.  

Ms Tamra covered one of the ice-cubes with salt (lowers the melting temperature) 

and pretty soon yellow bear looked like it was in a pile of snow instead of ice.

We played a game passing ice-cubes around to the music 

while we waiting for the salt to do it's magic . . .

The heat from our hands warmed the ice-cube and it started to melt (we could feel the water!) 

and the coldness of the ice-cube made our hands colder!

Brr! Cold hands! 

Getting smaller!

and smaller . . . 

Almost gone!

Then like magic--the ice was gone! 

Nothing was left of it but our cold wet hands.

And look! 

Because of the salt, yellow bear is out of his ice-cube, 

while red bear still has lots of it on his back.

  

Wow! It's temperature magic!!