What Effects Ice Melting?

Our Science Investigation

Display Area for Freezing and

Melting Science Unit

My class had been undertaking a science unit on Freezing and Melting, this unit formed the basis

for my science lesson series

Deciding what to cover was only the

first step…I needed to consider what I wanted

them to achieve, how they were going to be able to achieve this and how this would help them to develop

I needed to ask myself questions…

O What did they knowO How could they use thisO What were their next learning stepsO What aspects should I coverO What will the learning intentions beO What Nature of Science am I

incorporating

Once I had my answersI needed to plan how to make it come together

To find out their prior knowledge

and understandings

We started with an open discussion about Ice:

While passing around ice cubes we discussed words

that described ice and identified what we already

knew about ice

The students were proud of their knowledge of ice as a

solid

We built on our discussion by creating posters

Identifying what we knew about ice…

We then questioned What else would we

like to know?

We used the question starter “I wonder……..”

One of the questions that we wanted answered was:What affects ice

melting?

The students identified substances that they wanted to investigate

O Their choices ranged from oil to vinegar and baking soda

O And from vinegar and salt to hot sauce

We made predictions and used ice balloons to put them to the test

(please note; these two images are taken from the internet as my camera decided it wouldn’t work for these shots

The ice balloons were a fantastic resource to use. The Large smooth balls

of ice enables students to clearly see the

characteristics of ice that we had been discussing.

We noted our initial observations – and then monitored at set intervals

When all our ice had melted….

O We discussed the results, drew our conclusions and compared our predictions

O Some of the results surprised us all

O We learnt that the motor oil, although turning our mixture into a gooey had little effect

O We also learnt that the hot sauce turned it a neat colour, and it smelled yummy, didn’t really effect the ice melting either.

The vinegar and salt and the vinegar and baking soda made the ice melt a lot faster, they also altered the shape of the ice melting, with our other

mixtures the balloons melted evenly, when these two

mixtures were added the balloons bubbled and fizzed

and large dents formed.

The students learnt about what sorts of mixtures can effect

ice melting

But they also learnt that investigations may answer some questions, but they also create new questions

We now had more questions to investigate

…….On conclusion of this series of lessons, all the students were eager to explore, investigate, predict and find answers to

their new questions.

This series of lessons was a huge success…

All students enjoyed wearing the ‘scientist hat’ and viewing themselves

as scientists.They posed questions, predicted

answers and tested theories.They learnt not only about the topic

that we were investigating but also the process of scientific investigation