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In this instructional sequence students investigate air to better model and understand how it is a form of matter, has weight, and takes up space like solids and liquids, but is invisible because the particles are spread too far apart. Students will learn through investigations that gas can be "squished" into a very small space or expand to fill much larger spaces.

This is the first instructional sequence in a teacher's guide built with the purpose of helping students build a deeper understanding of the Structures and Properties of Matter standard.Students have the opportunity to engage with interactive simulations, create poetry, drawing scientific diagrams, read complex text, develop evidence based explanations and design a model . The instructional sequen ...

Students explore mixtures and solutions in this 5E lesson. Students add soil to water, stir it and repeat the procedure with salt, then compare the two. Students then collaborate to explain differences in changes between the mixtures, built on experiences in modeling from previous lessons. The resource includes examples of students work to support a teacher's implementation of this lesson.

This probe introduces the phenomena of dissolving sugar and elicits students understanding of what happens when substances are added to a liquid, what happens when sugar dissolves in water. The probe is designed as a formative assessment to be used at the beginning or in the midst of a unit of study on matter and its interactions.

In the lesson outlined in this article, students use kinesthetic modeling to explain the states of matter. Solids have a definite shape and volume. Liquids have a definite volume, but take the shape of their container and gases take the shape of their containers and their volume is not definite.