Does what happens to a gas and a liquid regarding molecular motion also happen to a solid?  What if we heat and cool a solid?  How does it change, if at all?

We're working through our reasoning to this phenomenon and we're discovering many things.  We still have questions about how we smell an odor though since we don't see all solids melt, and we recognize we smell something b/c there must be a gas particle in the air.  It's getting us thinking for sure!

How does food coloring respond when placed in both cold and hot water?  What can this show us about how the molecules of water and food coloring interact with one another, especially when the temperatures of the water are drastically different?  We're using this experience to gain a greater understanding of how molecular motion works!

We're continuing to develop models to explain our thinking how molecular motion is related to temperature and phase changes, ultimately trying to explain how we can smell an odor from a distance.  Today we used beads and bottles to strengthen our models that we've drawn on paper.  Drawings can't show molecular motion like this!

As a liquid heats up, its molecules collide into one another, causing them to take up more space.  Some of these molecules have enough energy to change into a gaseous molecule.

But when happens as these gaseous molecules begin to cool down?  

Sixth graders are looking at the process of condensation.  They've developed a model to explain this phenomenon.  

We've also looked at real world examples of this process--"fog" on the mirror in the bathroom after a cold shower, contrails behind a jet flying in the sky, water dripping from a glass filled with ice water.

How can we represent the motion we saw from an online simulation?  How can we show that as the temperature of a substance increases, the motion of the molecules changes, too?

We're continuing to work on the practice of modeling, and our observations are showing us that molecules not only move faster as the temperature increases, but the volume also increases, too.  We've also discovered that even though substances can be solids at specific temperatures, the molecules that make them up are STILL moving, too!