Making connections for our 2nd graders takes time and planning. We were studying matter and decided to melt a snowman, as an experiment, to show our kiddos the three states of matter. I built a snowman and kept him in the freezer until the fateful day. I brought Mark’s wok into school and proceeded to melt the snowman at 400 degrees. You just wouldn’t believe how quickly the snowman went from a solid to a gas. It was fun! The students included their observations in their science notebooks.
Then, we had them work on the “Life Cycle of a Snowman” which asked them to describe the 3 different states. Next, which you can see above, we wrote about our experiment in a narrative format.
Finally, as we begin writing how-to’s, we wrote a class version of “How to Melt a Snowman” complete with plenty of voice and description. Our students were able to authentically create three different forms of writing using the same experiment as inspiration. I loved the whole process and it seems as though our second graders did also.
