Keeping Warm in Febrrrrruary

Challenge
It’s the month of Febrrrrrruary according to the weather. It’s definitely providing some cold temperatures as it starts and will most likely continue. How do you stay warm when going outside in this weather? What makes you stay the warmest? Do you wear different types of clothes during the winter for different temperatures? How come? What types of fabrics are used in winter clothing? After thinking about all these questions, think which hat, glove, scarf, sock, or boot would keep you the warmest. That is your challenge this month, to find out which of these items will help you stay the warmest. Gather a bunch of different types of these in your classroom or at home to help you decide. Your ultimate challenge is to construct a method to fairly test which items will keep you the warmest. Be sure to make predictions, collect data, and share your findings.

Your method does have some criteria and constraints. Make sure to use different types of gloves, boots, scarves, and socks, the same type of thermometer, to reset the thermometers to room temperature, to allow the same amount of time when testing each item, etc.  

Materials

• thermometers
• variety of mittens/gloves
• variety of hats
• variety of scarves
• variety of boots
• variety of socks

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Hints and Tips for Success

1. Allow students planning and discussion time of how they are going to set up their experiments to be sure they are doing fair trials.
2. After planning and discussion, allow student groups to create their data charts for their experiments. Students can share their data charts and ideas of fair testing as needed, which can allow other groups to adjust their thinking.
3. For differentiation, adjust the amounts of items to be used, provide guidelines for fair testing/amounts of time to test, provide the data charts, etc.
4. After experiments, discuss results as a class to see which item keeps the body the warmest. (The data should show that the items do not make the thermometer show much, if any, in difference in temperatures). Have students ask questions after analyzing to gather their thoughts.
5. Inform class that body temperature creates the heat and these items help trap the heat to keep the body warm.
6. Have students redesign their experiments with this notion in mind repeating steps 1-4 to complete the challenge.
7. Connect to science by discussing energy, thermal energy, properties of materials, heat, energy transfer, temperature, and weather.
8. Connect to ELA by reading The Mitten by Jan Brett or How Heat Moves by Sharon Coan, or The Energy That Warms Us: A Look at Heat by Jennifer Boothroyd to explore some concepts around heat.