In Science, we were learning about the states of matter in my 2nd grade classroom. We had already learned the difference between a liquid, solid, and gas. We had filled up balloons with air, water, and then froze one of the balloons to represent the solid. Students had felt the balloons, compared them, discussed the differences, and recorded them in their Science journals on the previous day. I was looking for something fun and different and came across "The Lifecycle of a Snowman" from The Frugal Teacher's Blog (http://www.frugalteacher.com/2011/09/life-cycle-of-snowman.html) I loved the idea and made a few tweaks to make it my own. If you want to try this lesson, I would definitely recommend going to her page because she has an instruction page on how to build the snowman I will talk about later.
I told my class that we had a fun experiment planned for the afternoon and that we had a special visitor coming to help us. Olaf from Frozen was going to help us get started. I played this video of "In Summer."
Olaf set up the perfect Science Experiment! What would happen if he went to summer and felt the effects of heat? Students were then asked to share their predictions. Then, in the back of the room, I had set up one of Olaf's friends on our hot plate. The "snowman" was made from 3 frozen balloons. I learned from The Frugal Teacher's blog that after you fill the balloons with water, you set them in bowls with plates on top of the balloons when you set them in the freezer to help create a flat base to stack the snowman's body parts together. (Do this at least 2 days before your planned experiment to be sure your snowman is frozen solid) Use salt to help the body parts stick together. Add cut out pieces of felt for the eyes, nose, mouth, and buttons.
Here is a picture of our class snowman. I was only able to get two of the frozen pieces to stick - my third plate must of slid in the freezer because it was not level at all and would not stay on! But, it didn't stop our experiment!
I let each student pick a name for Olaf's friend and then drew a picture of what their snowman looked like in the solid state of matter. We continued to turn up the "summer heat" and watched as Olaf's friend changed from a solid, to a liquid, to a gas. We recorded our observations of the changes as we went and drew pictures of what the snowman looked like in each stage and always predicting what would happen next. Here is our snowman friend towards the end of our experiment.
We watched as he turned into water vapor and disappeared into the air. A few students were upset that we killed Olaf's friend. But, we decided that really we were helping Olaf. He wanted to go to summer time and we did this experiment to see if he could survive. Our conclusions show that summer time would not be a safe place for Olaf to visit. So, we wrote letters to Olaf explaining the changes he would go through and why summer time was not a good idea for a snowman. I had seen this picture below at https://projectoriented.files.wordpress.com/2012/03/sb-snowman.jpg?w=487 and decided to use the paper bowl idea. We glued our written work and melted snowmen onto large pieces of blue construction paper and hung them out on our bulletin board.
Writing the letter helped students make the full circle and not be upset about our melted snowman. It was the perfect way for them to reflect back on the experiment and what they had learned. Only, they didn't realize they were reflecting on their learning. They were concerned friends of Olaf helping him to survive. This was such a fun day of learning in class! The students were talking about this experiment for weeks!
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