Three States of Water

Science Lesson

Well I gave a science lesson on the three states of water and let me tell you, it was a challenge. I found that right before giving the lesson I suddenly felt really nervous to speak in front of my class. I know this may sound silly when the class is made up of 23 5 and 6 year olds, but I was really scared! I started off with reading the story The Drop Around the World and the children liked the story. After the story I introduced the lesson with some questions about what they know about water. On a piece of chart paper I wrote down the ways in which they encounter water. They mentioned ideas such as oceans, rivers, etc and so I asked them about hard water or water in solid form. I asked them what types of winter activities they liked to do. They mentioned fun activities such as skiing, snowboarding, ice skating, ice fishing, etc. So far everything was going smoothly, until I started talking about gas. I tried explaining what water in a gaseous state is and how we encounter it and somehow this was a much harder task than I thought it would be. I tried to tell them about mist, rain, humidity, and how puddles “dry out.” I had some volunteers help me fill up some plastic cups with ice cubes and we hypothesized what might happen. The children had great ideas about the ice melting and turning to liquid water. One child even thought that there might be water on the outside of the cup. We wrote down our guesses and two hours later we went back to our cups to see what happened. The children drew pictures of what happened to the ice cubes and they wrote labels from the board such as “water, drops, ice, and liquid.” At the end of the lesson I felt like the children sort of go the idea and the large picture of the three states of water but I just felt so discouraged about the process of my instruction. I felt like I was at a loss of words and creative ideas for getting children to understand that liquid is constantly changing in a cycle from solid, liquid, and gas. Reflection on the lesson now, I can think of simple ways that I could have just told them, but at the time I was so distracted by getting the children to tell me what they thought happens to water in the cycle and how water changes from one state to another. I can see now, that the children honestly did not know about water in the three states, so it was not the best idea to have them tell me, rather I needed to give them some initial information to base their thoughts off.