We were asked what would happen to water when it froze...

 

We have been looking at the three states of matter; solid, liquid and gas. We know that every thing is made up of molecules and how they are able to move decides what state the object is.

We had to pour some water into a cup up to a vivid line and hypothesise (imagine) what would happen to the water when it froze. Some of us thought the water would stay on the line, some thought it would rise above the line and some thought it would freeze below the line.

Once Mrs Reid froze them in the freezer we got our cups back to look at. Our cups were plastic and some of them split as the water froze but all of them froze above the marked line. We saw that as water freezes it expands.

As water freezes into ice, the molecules become frozen in place and begin to arrange themselves in a rigid lattice structure. This structure causes the water to expand and become less dense.

That is very technical but we then got to take it out of the cups and go play outside with our lumps of ice. It was great watching it melt again back into water. We were really lucky to even see trapped air bubbles start to move around in the ice as it melted.

We think ice is pretty cool (ha ha).