Hot Particle - Cold Particle Tag

I'm sorry I've been missing these past few weeks. TCAP is around the corner and it seems to be all I can do to make it through the day! Today was a fun day though and I wanted to come and share some of our learning with you.

Heat Transfer!

We've been studying Heat and yesterday's lesson was on how heat moves (hot to cold, etc). The kids all got to enjoy my complete and utter lack of drawing skills as we entered examples of conduction, convection, and radiation into our notes. Friends that I play "Draw Something" with can bear witness to my skill-level. Well, today as a review we played Hot Particle-Cold Particle Tag.



Here's how we play it. 
1. Half of the students are designated as hot particles, while the other are cold particles.
2. The cold particle students have a piece of paper clipped to the back of their their shirt. The hot particles are given 10 stickers.

The Goal:

Five Heat Particles!

Five Heat Particles!

Students play a game of "tag" where the hot particles are to give away their heat (their stickers) to the cold particles until they are at equilibrium with all heat particles having five and each cold having five. Once the heat has given away five or the cold has five on it, students are to sway in place.

A few rules we made:
I had a set zone for students to run in.
Once tagged, the cold particle had to stand still so the heat could transfer (stick).
A cold particle had to be given a head start if they just got a sticker--no attacking someone just because someone else had tagged them.

It was a lot of fun and it only took like 10-15 minutes and it got us outside so I'm happy. :-) When we returned to class we did a bit more on the study of Heat, but their ticket out the door was to relate the game to what we know about how heat travels. After reading their responses, I know a few misconceptions that I need to address, but overall the kids seemed to get it. Phew!

A few "Ticket Out the Door" Responses

Until next time,
Mrs. J