Friday, April 13, 2012

Crayon-tastic!

Where have I been? Overwhelming exhausted is where I've been. It is nearing the end of my spring break and I was going to make sure to blog at the very beginning but I was still too exhausted even then. Whew I needed spring break something bad! Anyway, I wanted to show something cool that we did a couple weeks ago that we are getting ready to do again this week.

As part of our unit on matter, the kids and I did an activity called “Broken Crayon Factories.” I got the idea during my internship. I'm not sure where my teacher got the idea but I thought it was great. Basically, the kids take broken crayons (or regular crayons), peel them, and break them into small pieces. We then melted the crayons to show that adding heat changed the crayons' state of matter from a solid to a liquid and then cooled them off to go back to a solid. The kids loved it! In fact, they loved it so much that they decided to make more of them next week in our class store (more on that in a later entry, possibly!) to sell to other second graders.

Take a look at the process:








To go along with the crayon theme, we also made a melted crayon heart (from Pinterest). The kids were so amazed—I had so many parents come in (parent teacher conferences were not long afterwards) and say that their child said they HAD to check out our heart. Too cute!