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Session 1. What is Matter?: Properties and Classification of Matter
The moon as seen from space. |
Learning Goals
During this session, you will have an opportunity to build
understandings to help you:
- Recognize the criteria that make something “matter”
- Differentiate between essential and accidental properties of matter
- Understand some of the history behind the classification of matter
- Begin to build a model that differentiates between solids, liquids, and gases
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Video Overview
What is matter? This question at first
seems deceptively simple — matter
is all around us. Yet how do we define it? What does a block of
cheese have in common with the Moon? What are the characteristics of
matter
that set it apart from something that is definitely not matter?
Matter
is one of the big ideas in science. Most areas in physical science
can be discussed and explained in terms of matter or energy,
and matter
is a subject that naturally bridges to the other sciences (chemistry,
life, earth science, etc.). In this session, we’ll build
a working definition of matter, learn to distinguish between its “accidental” and “essential” properties,
and explore it through classification, an activity with a rich
history in science.
Video Outline
The video opens with a conversation among first and
second graders and their teacher, Joanie Grisham, at the Fayerweather
Street
School in Cambridge,
Massachusetts. After they sort through a variety of meanings
for the word “matter,” they
begin to make a list of criteria that can be used to decide
whether something is or is not matter.
The program continues with
what we call the “Science Studio,” where
children in different grade levels are presented with examples
of a variety of phenomena and asked to decide whether they are
matter or “not
matter.” From these and Joanie’s students’ ideas,
we begin to build a working definition of matter using a
graphic organizer.
We then visit Dr. Alberto Martinez, a
science historian at
the Dibner Institute for the History of Science and Technology
at
the Massachusetts
Institute
of Technology. He points out the importance of classification
in science and how it helps us make sense of the “wealth
of experience that is available to us.” Later Dr. Martinez
traces our classification schemes for matter back to Aristotle’s
theory that everything is made up of earth, air, fire and
water, with each element behaving in a
manner consistent with what he called its “natural
place.”
Then, children in the Science Studio apply their
classification skills to a favorite form of matter — candy.
We then visit Boxborough, Massachusetts, where Cindy
Plunkett leads her first graders in a lesson from the Science
and Technology for Children (STC) curriculum, Solids and
Liquids, in which they sort a variety of solids by their
observable properties.
Back in the Science Studio we see
what criteria the children use to describe solids, liquids,
and gases. Starting with
the criteria
the
children use,
we build on our graphic organizer to begin to distinguish
between the states of matter.
We continue with a visit to
another classroom in Salem, Massachusetts where Chris Bash’s 4th
and 5th graders explore a “mystery
substance” that
challenges the our working definitions of solids and liquids.
The
video ends with a visit to the MIT Plasma Science and Fusion
Center where plasma physicist Bob Granetz and his
colleagues
apply temperatures
hotter than the sun to hydrogen gas, to create a fourth
state of matter, plasma, which makes up 99% of our universe. View the video ==>
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