Nursery Science Week

How can we help Jack to escape from the ice before the giant comes back to eat him?

Everyone heard a knock at the door, so we went to investigate. We found a tiny man frozen in ice, along with a letter.

It said,

Dear children,

Please will you help me. This giant trapped me in the ice because he was cross when I tried to steal his hen. He is going to come back and eat me soon. Can you think of ways to help me escape?

Maybe you could think of something tasty that he would like to eat, so he doesn’t eat me?

Love from Jack

We took Jack inside the Nursery and all had a think about ways to help him escape from the ice. Noah said that we could use a hammer to smash the ice, but then we decided that we might hurt Jack. Libby suggested just chipping around the outside edges of the ice, then pulling him out, but we still thought that Jack’s legs would get hurt.

We all felt the ice; it was freezing cold. Someone suggested that the giant must have put Jack in the freezer. We talked about how we had previously frozen water to turn it into ice cubes.

Emily noticed that the ice was beginning to melt and said that it was because the Nursery was warm. This gave us a new idea – we needed to make the ice melt quickly. Olivia said that if we put the ice into a bowl of hot water it would melt and Jack could escape. Everyone agreed that this was a great idea. We put the ice into the hot water and counted to 20, then we took it out again. We were excited to see that the block of ice was getting smaller and Jack’s arms were beginning to stick out.

We repeated this several times, noticing the ice getting smaller and smaller until it had completely melted and Jack was able to swim away.

When we felt the water at the end of the experiment everyone noticed that it was no longer hot; it was now cold. Ava explained that it was because the ice had cooled it down.

Now we had to think of something that we could give the giant so that he wouldn’t want to eat Jack. We decided to make an enormous chocolate cornflake bun. We used our knowledge of melting ice to help us understand that chocolate also needed to be heated in order for it to melt.