Liquid, Solid and Gas - Inquiry

Monday
Today we began our inquiry. This is just a short 2 day inquiry that I thought would be a good lead in to our floating and sinking unit.

 I started off by showing my students a balloon - I asked them what was in it....nothing.

We started off with gas. I asked them what I could put in the balloon. They said "air". Easy. We talked about the gas and whether you could see it before I put it into the balloon. I introduced them to the word gas and explained what it is.

We talked about how water is a liquid and filled up our liquid balloons. At this point I started calling each matter a liquid, solid and gas.

We had liquid balloons and gas balloons, now it was time for solid balloons. Which of course, I already had on standby in the freezer (balloons filled with water, frozen overnight).They quickly used the words I was using to describe the balloons.
Ok, now we each had three balloons, all filled up and ready for scientific observations.They squeezed them.

They weighed them with their hands - we classified them from lightest to heaviest.

They continued observing and discussing their balloons for awhile. I was certain that by this point we would have had a popped balloon, but we didn't. So of course, the question I had been waiting for...

"Can we throw them?"

Of course we can. 
They started dropping balloons and reaching conclusions...

The "gas" balloons weren't cooperating with the destruction so my students had to get creative.  So much fun to be had just from popping balloons.

Once all our balloons had been popped we came in and started discussing different types of each matter that we know. My students drew a little picture for each to help them remember.

Tuesday


For writing today we wrote about what we did with the balloons. My students had to share what they learnt and then write a sentence about trying to pop each balloon. Was really great to see some of them using the simile sentences that we learnt last term.

For our topic in the afternoon I gave my students a sheet with a variety of matters on it. In partners my students discussed what category they should go under. We then came together and went through each object until we were happy we had got it right. I had the posters available that we made yesterday and was great that my students were referring back to them.