Water, Water Everywhere: part 1

Now that we have learned that water is all around us, in the entire world and very little of it is fresh water.  My next question was, where can we find water?  The children knew about getting water from the taps, the sky, the ocean, the beach, and from bottles in the store, I asked the children to go home and bring back a sample of water.

Alexis and Pippa: bathtub water
Orin: snow from the ice rink
Tai: water from a puddle by the playground and the water table

Water collection from outdoor water table

Water from bath at home

Water collection from the sink

When I asked the children about finding water in the air, perplexed, Lysander said, waving his hands, there is nothing in the air, it's just there."  With that, I decided that we should explore the different states of water.  Water can be found as a liquid, gas, and solid.

The Earth Group Scientists first task is to play with a milk jug sized ice cube!  Before opening the milk-jug ice, I asked them what would happen to the rectangular shape ice when I put it into a round container.

Pauline, Orin and Jeffery said the ice will stay rectangular shape. Orin also said "because ice is frozen and they stick together."

Pippa said "the ice is rectangle shape, but the water will be round shape!"

Alexis and Tai thought the ice will turn into round shape when it's in a round container.

As I opened the milk jug, children all wanted to have a term to hold it and touch the ice. Pauline said "the ice is hard and cold. It's like glass!" Orin accidentally dropped the ice on the floor, he said "it breaks (chips)!"

It took a long time for the ice to melt so we looked at it again in the afternoon. Jeffery pointed out that half of the ice was gone, he said "half became water!"  Alexis also noticed there was some bubbles inside the remaining ice!

In our next experiment, we moved on to explore the melting speed of ice cubes. We flipped the one minute timer 5 times, then compared the size of ice in each tray. The children created the chart to record their observations. We concluded that the blue salt made the ice melt the fastest and the ice without salt melted the slowest.