Teaching Matter with Root Beer Floats!

My students pretty much loved my student teacher and I on Friday as we are about to conclude our unit on Matter.  They have been very good about recognizing the various states and how the states change.

As a little reward for their hard work during this unit, we decided to give them some root beer floats – but not without learning about them first!

While the students were in Library, my student teacher poured the root beer into cups.  You should have seen their faces when I brought them back into the room.  They thought we were just giving them something to drink!

Then, we reviewed liquids.  The students were able to tell us that the liquids don’t have a definite shape, take the shape of the container that they are in, and have molecules that can move freely.

After talking about liquids, we took out some ice cream that we were hiding.  You would have thought we were giving them gold!  They were so excited because they figured out what we were going to do!  We also discussed solids and their properties and we took scoops and put them into the cups of root beer.

The students were easily able to see how adding the ice cream made the carbonation in the root beer fizz, which they concluded was a gas.

This was such a fun way to end our week!

Do you want to read about another fun way to teach the states of matter?  Come read another of my posts about Demonstrating States of Matter By Making Orange Soda!

 

If you are looking for some more activities to enhance your unit on matter, I have Matter – Solids, Liquids, Gases Unit Activites that might want to check out!  What I love about it is that it has reading comprehension passages that help tie in informational reading to science.  The short
fill in the blank activities for each passage really help reinforce the skill of going back in the text to find your answer.  You will also find a few interactive activities for your students to do too!