What is Matter?

Last week we started our "Science at Home Awards".  The girls need to complete 10 experiments from the 15 that we were provided with from the 200 Super Science Investigations and they will receive an award, I assume a certificate, in chemistry.

There's no time limit, you just work your way through the experiments at your own pace, so this suits us perfectly.

The first experiment they tackled was "What is matter?"

In this activity, they looked at the properties of matter and then did comparisons between liquids, solids and gases.

Here they are weighing something before recording it on the table they drew up.

Their findings were that:
1. Everything takes up space
2. You can touch solids and liquids but not gases
3. Everything has mass, even air
4. Liquids and gases can easily change shape but solids can't easily
5. Liquids and gases can spread to fill a container but a sold mass can't

For eight and ten year olds working on their first experiment solo (although I am not sure how much help Scruffie offered - see him there on the couch behind them overseeing their work), I thought they did pretty well coming up with the answers that they did, and best of all they really enjoyed doing it as you can see from their faces.