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Melting Point of Ice; Delta Science Modules
 Lesson
at a Glance:
Curriculum: Delta Science Modules “States of Matter”
Grade: Sixth
Topic: Melting Point of Ice
During the two weeks prior to the lesson seen in the video,
the students had been studying various kinds of energy transfer with their
teacher Gina Robertson. In this lesson, Paula asks the students to put
a thermometer in a glass of ice and take a reading. They then remove the
thermometer from the ice and place it in a glass of warm water. As the
students watch the volume of the red liquid in the thermometer expand,
they speculate that it is because it has absorbed “heat energy” from
the warm water. Paula comments, “First I wanted to develop the idea
that the same amount of matter, which is that red liquid, can somehow occupy
two different amounts of space, and why that’s happening.”
The
students then return the thermometer to the glass of ice and observe
the red liquid contract again. “I hope we can get them to see that
it is happening because there is heat being transferred into the molecules
of the red liquid when it is in the hot water, and the transfer is out
of the hot red liquid when you put it in the cool water. So it goes the
opposite way and suddenly the matter takes up less space,” said
Paula.
Later, the students pour some of the warm water into the
glass of ice and carefully observe the red liquid in the thermometer. From
this experiment,
they were able to notice that there is a moment just before the ice
begins
to melt in which the temperature of the water is the same temperature
that
the ice was. Paula remarks, “This lesson is about the melting point
of ice but, in actuality, what I am looking for is for them to develop
ideas about the effect of energy on the change of state of matter, and
the effect on the motion of molecules when energy comes in contact or
transfers in or out of a state of matter, whatever that might be.”
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