What's the Matter? Matter! - Buzzing with Ms. B

Do you like my horribly cheesy joke? Oh well. It doesn’t really matter.
MATTER! Get it?!

Hahahahahahaha!
But what does matter is I have spent a week working on this new pack and I’m super excited about using it in the classroom next year. Physical Science always seems so difficult for my kids to understand. I think it’s because it’s all so abstract – tiny particles they can’t see doing things that they don’t understand to make states of matter that they don’t care about. A lot of factors are playing into this, I guess.
This is also one of our first major science units, and kids are still getting into the swing of being in a new grade level and learning things at a different level, so they have always seemed to have a hard time with it.
To improve their understanding, I try to do as much hands-on stuff as I can to get them to ‘see’ what’s happening.
I heart foldables, by the way. And it seems that the one I hear the most is the flapbook. They’re just so useful. So I want to make this one next year with the kids to represent the different properties of matter and then have them hunt through magazines to find pictures to illustrate them.

I’ve made this foldable several years in a row to help students organize information about solids, liquids, and gases. We used punched-out circles from a hole punch to represent the molecules.

One of my favorite investigations to do is the Density Lava Lamps investigation. Students use basic household materials to make a ‘lava lamp’ that actually demonstrates the property of density. Superfun.