Matter Test Tuesday October 8

We are wrapping up matter and we will be taking an assessment next Tuesday. The following items will be on the test:

• 3 states of matter
• properties of matter
• mixtures and solutions
• separating mixtures
• physical and chemical changes

Students are free to take their books and journals home, but they must be returned! Let me know if you have any questions!

Science in the News

Once a 9 weeks, I will be offering extra credit in Science! This is not a mandatory assignment; it’s for extra credit and will be offered only 1 time a 9 weeks. They may not submit more than 1 Science in the News assignment a quarter.

Students will need to research and find an article of an occurrence of Science in the News. The article has to be science related. They will need to complete a sheet on what the article is about. I have attached the sheet to here so you can see what it is. In order to get full credit, they must complete the entire sheet and attach the article. If you do not have access to a computer, students may come in early to school and look for an article then. I will post their work on a bulletin board in my classroom.  

This assignment is to bring awareness to the students of how much science is in the world around them. I hope they are as excited as I am about this!

Physical Changes

Earlier this week, we looked at physical changes. I modeled a physical change by ripping, tearing, cutting, and crumbling paper. We read and then determined that a physical change is when 1 or more properties change, but it does not change into a new type of matter. We came up with some examples: melting, evaporating, condensation, freezing (which are all affected by temperature), cutting, tearing, ripping, crushing, and twisting.

The investigation we did was we put a piece of ice into a bag (actually we did this three times) and then placed 1 bag into hot water, cold water, and then room temperature water. Students recorded the temperature of each water and then observed. Students determined that the hot water caused the ice cube to melt the fastest. They are becoming quite the little scientists!!

Chemical Changes

Today we looked at chemical changes and how they are affected by temperature. I modeled 2 chemical changes first: a candle being burned that gave off heat and light and then a chemical reaction that caused gas bubbles. We then did a little reading and learned that chemical changes are when a new type of matter is formed and you cannot change it back to its original matter. Some examples we listed were: burning, cooking, baking, eating, rusting, rotting/molding. There is evidence that lets us know that a chemical change has taken place--gives off heat and light, a change in color, a new smell, and a formation of a solid (like the yummy cake we made). Students did GREAT!!! They were able to tell me what a chemical change was and some examples. For the end, we made a chocolate cake. Baking the cake and eating the cake were both a chemical change.

For our experiment that we did today, we put fizzy tablets into water and observed the chemical change. Students got a real kick out wearing the glasses! Some told me that they really felt like scientists today!!

How does temperature affect physical change?

Wednesday we did an investigation where we were looking at temperature and how it can affect a physical change. We put ice cubes in a sandwich bag with a thermometer. Students took the initial temperature, and then 5-10-15. We were observing the ice cube melting (the physical change) and seeing that heat caused it.

Matter Matters!!

We are starting to wrap up our matter unit and I wanted to share what we have done so far. Our students have been working so hard and I could not be more proud!

Here are some of the charts we have made:

Nature of Science

Hello all!!I wanted to post some charts from our Nature of Science benchmarks. We did these in the beginning of the year....but these benchmarks will be embedded in all of our lessons this year!