Investigation Air (and other forms of matter)

So after a long (but insightful) discussion, we agreed that air has to play a role in smelling something since almost all the models had it in them.

Since air is invisible, we decided to work with some things that could maybe help us better understand air and it's role in smelling something from a distance.

So we used what we had around our classroom...playdoh, balloon, blocks, etc.  And we figured out some important concepts.​

Regardless of something's state of matter, all matter has mass and volume.  Mass is a measure of how much matter is in something, and we use a scale to measure this quantity in grams.  Volume is the space that matter takes up.  We figured out that two objects can have the same mass and take up very different volumes, and the opposite is also true.  Two objects can have the same volume but have different mass.  The concept of density, which is the ratio of mass to volume, will be explored later in future grades.