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Hello. One of the TEKS for Kinder is about showing students how different materials can be changed by heating or cooling. What materials can be used to show students what happens when materials are heated or cooled down? Would it also be wise to have a singled hot plate in place somewhere where the students can not reach it but can see what is going on?
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I've used balloons before. One is filled with air, one with water, and the third one with water that is frozen. For the heating part, you can use a kettle and heat the water on the hot plate to show the water turns into a vapor-steam. Maybe that is what you were planning for the hot plate.
Another cool thing that is a huge wow is to put Ivory soap into a microwave to see what happens when heat is applied. You can have them make predictions. This is where I got that from with the complete lesson I use with 4th and 5th graders.
https://www.scholastic.com/teachers/blog-posts/alycia-zimmerman/experimenting-exploding-soap-volume-density-teamwork/
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Hello! There are many wonderful ways to show kindergartners how different materials can be changed by heating or cooling. Water is the first to come to mind because it can be shown in all three states of matter and students can observe how one substance can change in different ways depending on whether it is heated or cooled.
Having a demonstration of using heat to pop corn kernels into popcorn, make pancakes, and melt chocolate are all different ways to show how materials are changed through heating and the opportunity to snack on them later will only add to students' interest! To show the effects on materials through cooling, students can observe what happens when melted chocolate, fruit juice, water, etc. are frozen.
To support student learning of the objective with process skills, it's a good idea to have students engage in forming hypotheses, recording observations, and drawing conclusions to simultaneously learn about heating and cooling and have a firmer grasp on the scientific process.
A hot plate could potentially be a safe issue so it's best to make sure that your district, school heads and parents are all right with it and then judge whether your class will be able to follow the necessary safety procedures. It would certainly be useful in displaying some of the changes related to heating objects but I don't think it's necessary.
This is a really fun TEKS so you and your students should enjoy the lesson! I got some ideas from the following link which I thought had other useful ideas as well: https://www.bloglovin.com/blogs/chalk-talk-a-kindergarten-blog-3983200/how-heat-changes-things-1680159681
I hope this helps!
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Our primary grade students had fun observing balloons on top of soda bottles covered with black paper and left outside on a warm, sunny day. The air inside the soda bottle expands due to heat causing the balloon to swell up. When the bottle is placed inside the room (or refrigerator for quick results) the air takes up less space and so the balloon shrinks back to its original size.
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The balloon on the bottle is a great idea. Just one clarification:
'When the bottle is placed inside the room (or refrigerator for quick results) the air takes up less space....'
It's not that the air takes of less space. A gas will fill whatever volume it is in. The point here is that when you heat a gas, its pressure increases. So when you heat the air in the bottle, the pressure increases to the point where the air exerts enough force to make the balloon expand. When you cool it off, the air pressure decreases to the point where the elastic forces in the balloon become greater than the force exerted by the air; so the balloon shrinks.
You can extend this idea by discussing how the heating of air by the sun will increase the air pressure, and this increased pressure causes winds to blow!
Matt
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You could show how density changes when water is heated or cooled by using colored water. Heat some water with red food coloring and slowly put it into a clear container that has half full with room temperature water. It should form a layer that "floats" on top of the cooler water. Then do a similar thing with a new container half filled with room temperature water and slowly add ice water with red food coloring added. This should form a layer on the bottom of the container.
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Thank you for that important clarification, Matthew! A similar issue exists with the explanation of convection currents as well. Almost all textbooks talk about "hot air rising" and "cold air sinking" as if there is an impenetrable barrier between hot air and cold air. here's an NSTA link addressing both topics:http://www.nsta.org/publications/news/story.aspx?id=52428
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Hello Brenda,
I think that the TEK you have is very broad and you can use many things for it. The one thing that came to my mind when I was reading your post was candles.Candles are inexpensive and fast to heat and cool. You can show what happens to a candle when it is heated by melting it. You can show what happens when the melted candle cools down because it hardens up. One precautionary thing I would do is demonstrate the states of matter by myself. This is just in case the kids touch the hot wax or fire.
- Angelica
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