For Trimester 2, first graders will spend a lot of time learning about weather. Before we can fully understand how weather works, it’s important to understand the states of matter. Last week, we read a nonfiction book called Matter is Everywhere to get started. Students learned that the three states of matter are solid, liquid, and gas. They practiced identifying objects by their state of matter by doing a states of matter sort.
This week, we will dive in deeper. Today, we learned that molecules are inside everything and the way they are organized determines if a material will be a solid, liquid or gas. In a solid, molecules are packed tightly and cannot move around. In a liquid, the molecules are spaced further apart, meaning the liquid can move much more easily than a solid. This is why a liquid flows, but a solid does not. In a gas, the molecules are spaced very far apart and can flow freely. We used students to represent the molecules to try it out for ourselves! Can you tell which picture below is representing a solid, liquid, and gas?
After practicing with students as molecules, the students went to work to represent the molecules of each state of matter by using Cheerios and glueing them to images of a solid, liquid, and gas in the appropriate formation.
