Friday, February 18, 2011

Fun with Hot and Cold

One of the activities I have planned for this month is to talk more about, and experiment with, hot and cold. Seeing that we've had both snow and 70 degree temperatures here this month, it has been a good time for it!

Last week we went on a hunt for rocks, which wasn't as easy as you'd think in the city neighborhood that we live in. It took a lot of looking, but we finally found a few and washed them off. The next step was to put half in the freezer and to boil the other for a minute, letting the hot rocks cool down just enough to avoid burning.


 Unfortunately, when presenting, instead of saying that the rocks were warm and cold, I accidentally said "hot", which Ty knows means he shouldn't really shouldn't touch. I was happy that he was a bit fearful of the rocks after this, that he understands not to touch something I've told him is hot, but of course the activity was bust. Oops! I tried again a several days later, but once he saw the activity on his rug he hid behind me and wouldn't come near it. Oh well. I had another way to experiment with the topic, so we just moved on! My plan was to identify the two temperatures and sort them accordingly by the way, in case you'd like to try this with your child.



Here I made different sized ice blocks which we then played with in very warm water to observe the melting process. To make this even more fun, after the blocks were in the freezer for a bit, I added a few little treasures and a ball that would be exposed for play during different stages of melting. I also added a rainbow of food coloring half-way through freezing. If you put the food color in at the right time, it will become suspended in the middle of the ice block and it looks really neat!



Hmmm...what's in there?

This ball is stuck!


This was a fun science project and Ty was thrilled to play with water in the house Our Pergo flooring is certainly not water friendly so his water play has had to pretty much remain in the bath tub until it gets a bit warmer outside. He constantly wanted to dump the water out at the end so I played a lot of defense!

Observing how much the ice had melted at this point and comparing to one cube we left out of the water. 


   “We especially need imagination in science. It is not all mathematics, nor all logic, but it is somewhat beauty and poetry.”
--Dr. Maria Montessori 


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