What is Snow? unit study

We've been trying to study snow all week. The beginning of the week, I wondered if that was such a good idea since there was no snow on the ground, but we plowed through anyway. Wednesday morning, I woke up to frost, but knew by the time we got to that point in our school day, it would be gone. So I searched outside for something that I could bring in that had frost on it. Luckily, the boys had left a small football outside that had frost on it, so I brought it in and put it into the deep freeze before the boys got up. When we got to our snow study that day, I got out the football and a couple magnifying glasses. We got to look at it for about 5 minutes before the frost melted. However, the boys - being the boys that they are - discovered the art of using a magnifying glass to burn things. Here are a couple of pictures from that experiment (which had nothing to do with snow, but fun for them none the less.)



And here is an unfortunate plastic frog that now has a hole in his body.



Today we had a small amount of snow fall. We used a cold piece of paper to collect some snow and bring it to the freezer. We tried to take a look under the microscope with a cold slide, but our house is too warm, or we are not fast enough. The snowflakes melted before we got a look. We will most likely have to take the microscope outside to have a good look.

We talked about the volume of snow compared to the volume of rain (water.) We were able to fill a jelly jar with snow and let it melt. It was amazing how little water that left us!

We made paper snowflakes and 3-d snowflakes, so our house looks more like winter now. Unfortunately, it stopped snowing and we only ended up with about 1/2 inch, more or less. We'll finish up our study tomorrow with the "life cycle" of a snowflake.


(These snowflakes were made yesterday, before today's snow.)


Alex's 3-D snowflake.


It's hard to see the colors on Nicolas's because of the light behind it, but it's blue and purple.