This one was too complex to "take" a piece of clipart. Never mind.

Today’s Gratitude Item: Data loggers with temperature probes! We got some brand new ones at school which work perfectly with our laptops. The plan for after camp is to show my 6th graders what happens (temperature wise) as ice is heated until it becomes boiling water. We will be doing a topic on “matter” and teaching them about solids, liquids and gases is fairly critical. The neat thing is that they will be able to see the temperature slowly rising and watch a graph of this being plotted in real time. Trust me, for 6th graders, this is actually quite exciting. The key thing I want them to see is that whilst the ice is melting, the temperature stays at 0 degrees and then when it starts to boil, the temperature does not go above 100 degrees. When they did the “boiling water” experiment themselves, the class thermometers were not properly calibrated so some of them were getting readings of 102 and 104 degrees (whoops)!