Chemical and Physical Change

Chemical and Physical Change is a unit that is tough for me teach.  It is tough for me because I think it is one of the "simple" concepts, but the students have a hard time grasping it!  Am I alone with this feeling?  (I surely hope not!)  I will say that after my unit was over the kids did great on their PARs assessment!  Here are just a FEW of the things we did in class that I snapped a picture of...

Introduction day, we talked about how particles move inside solids, liquids, and gas.  We did hand movements to show that solids just vibrate in place and don't have a lot of space to move.  Inside a liquid we did a rolling type movement.  This represents that liquids take the space of the container and are a little more free flowing.  For gas are hands are popping all over the place!  

Another experiment we did at the end was just a fun toy that I had found.  It was the melting snowman.  We watched this little guy "melt" throughout the day.  Here are the pictures.  The next day we discussed if we thought this was a chemical of physical change.  What do y'all think?

We watched magic beads aka WATER beads and we observed the changes they under went with water.  We discussed what type of change these under went and even kept them out a couple of weeks to see if they actually returned to their original size or not.

Other experiments: rusting steel wool, vinegar and baking soda, alka setlzer tablet in water, and ripping up paper.

We also memorized this poem...

We also created this foldable.  I adapted because I didn't do the printout.  Instead we just hand wrote the information.  You can read more about here, at Ms Savvy Science!  

What do you do for chemical and physical change?