Investigating Snow and Ice

This winter, our class spent quite a bit of time investigating snow and ice.

Our first heavy snowfall had everyone extremely excited. No one wanted to wait for recess, so we brought the snow inside in bins. The children touched it, felt it melt in their hands, coloured it with markers, watched it melt throughout the day into a grey puddle, and recorded what they noticed. 

We read book after book about winter, snow, and snowflakes. Here's a few that we read:

We learned that snow crystals usually have six arms or sides. After looking closely at several pictures of magnified snow crystals, and noticing their shapes and symmetry, we tried drawing our own:

Notice the symmetry of AV's heart snowflakes

KL's snow crystal shows the tiny bit of dirt, pollen, or ash that we learned the snow crystal forms around.

BW working hard

KB's winter scene

NH worked really hard on his snow crystal, intently drawing for over 30 minutes.

He was proud of the finished product.

Throughout the season, we sang snowflake songs, played the glockenspiels to make them sound like falling snow, and danced like snow blowing in the wind. 

After weeks of warm weather, one March afternoon brought a snow storm to our town. While most of the school grumbled about the return to cold, our class was excited. It meant we could finally try to catch the snowflakes and examine them closely with our magnifying glasses: something we'd read about in a book but didn't have a chance to try since the snow melted so quickly this year. We made snowflake catchers out of black construction paper and raced outside to get started. Sometimes the best lessons are completely spontaneous and child driven!

We also had the chance to examine ice.

One week, I brought in several hundred ice cubes in many different colours. I set up a table with salt, water, glitter, pouring cups and let the kids discover. They watched the ice slide and melt, noticed the colours mixing, observed what happened when they added salt, tried to build structures etc..

Here are some of the things the children noticed and wondered:

"It is colourful," LP

"Salt made them come apart," RL

"Salt made them come apart," RL

"They are melting," "How did the water get out?" AG

I wonder ... why the ice is getting small. KW

I wonder... why ice floats. KB

Another day, students arrived to find many of the small toys frozen in a tub of ice. They had to figure out how to get them out by chipping, digging, and melting.

Just one more way to learn science concepts through play!