States of Matter With An Ice-Cream Float

Food always make learning better!  And food is the perfect medium for learning about matter.

My kiddo and I had a blast learning about the states of matter and enjoying a root beer float!  Here's a look at this engaging, Next Gen Science aligned experiment.

What You'll Need

For this states of matter science lab, you'll need...
*clear plastic cups
*clear spoons
*root beer (these small mini-cans would be perfect for parters or individual kiddos to share!)
*vanilla ice-cream
*ice-cream scoop

Science Lab Steps

Before this experiment, we front loaded our knowledge of the states of matter ome pebblego articles, and through sorting and observing properties of matter.  We also sorted objects by their state of matter.

On science lab day, we set out all of our materials and talked about which were solids, liquids and gases.  We recorded our ideas on our lab sheet.  Then, we predicted whether the root beer and ice cream would change.  We wrote our predictions.

Then, it was time to cook up the float.  You will want to do these steps altogether so that partners don't work ahead and ruin the fun for someone else close by.  So, everyone makes the float together.

We added the ice-cream and observed any changes....and then licked the scoop! :)

No changes...yet.

Then, we added the root beer and observed any changes.

BAM! Changes!  We loved seeing the liquid fizz up into a gas!  We recorded our results in the root beer column.



Then, we let the float sit for about an hour.  While we were waiting, we drew and labeled the float.

Then we observed the changes in the ice-cream!

Oh yeah, and while we waited on the ice-cream to melt we made our own floats to eat!

If you are doing this in the classroom, just save your ice cream float for an hour and let the kids eat theirs!  You can all observe the extra float after an hour.

You can find this experiment and tons more activities in this Next Gen Science Matter unit.

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