This week, as part of STEM (Science Technology Engineering and Maths) week, we have been looking at ice.
We each had an ice cube on a paper towel. We looked at it and what was happening to the paper towel. We held it and discussed how it felt and we even had a sniff to see if it had a smell!
We left our ice cubes (on the folded paper towel) on the carpet while we went for lunch and were keen to see what had happened when we returned.
Many of the ice cubes had melted but a few had hung on and there were small bits of ice left.
We talked about snowmen and what happens when the sun comes out and so we decided to see if we could make a snowman coat to keep him cold and not melt. However, we had a problem as we haven't had any snow! So, we decided to use an ice cube as a tiny little snowman.
The children were asked what materials we could use to make a snow coat. We talked about 'insulation' and we looked at photographs of lunchboxes to help with the point about keeping things cold.
The children said we could make a snowman coat with either paper, wool, plastic, wood or foil. We decided to try two types of plastic - see through plastic and black bin liner plastic. We used lolly sticks for our wood coat.
Further ice cubes (of the same size) were wrapped in their different coats and we left them untouched for around an hour.
The class made predictions about which coat would be the best for keeping the ice cold. Fifteen children thought the foil would be the best, five thought the wool, three thought the paper and there were two for each type of plastic.
The wooden coat was a late addition! Our investigations showed that in this instance the wool coat was the most effective and contained the largest piece of ice.
