Of Suncatchers and States of Matter

Today we were talking about states of matter. In high school, it wasn't the most inspirational of lessons I had in my physical science class. Rather boring, in fact. Solid, liquid, gas, heating curves, energy equations...yawn. I was determined to make it a little more fun for my kids, at least as an interesting introduction before they have to face all the tedious details.

First, I held up a crayon and asked the little scientists what the crayon was like. “It’s hard,” Jay told me.

“That’s right! This crayon is a solid. Things that are hard like this crayon and the table and ice cubes are solid. What about water?”

“It’s wet and splashy,” the kids responded.

“Water and milk and things that are splashy are called liquids. What happens when you get water really, really cold?”

Jay thought for a minute. “It freezes!”

“That’s right! It becomes a solid. And when water gets really, really hot, it becomes a gas with molecules floating around in the air. So things can change from solids to liquids to gasses and back again. They change their “state of matter.” Today, we’re going to add heat to a solid and change it into a liquid, then back into a solid. Cool, huh?”

Jay looked at me rather blankly, so we just moved on with the demonstration. Enough telling, time for a show. We were going to make Crayon Suncatchers.

We began by plugging in our iron and letting it get fairly hot--we used the Cotton setting. Meanwhile, we started shaving off pieces of crayon using fine cheese graters and rasps. [We stuck with a nice Fall color palette of red, yellow, and orange, but you can use any colors you like. ] We talked about how even though we were changing the crayon from a single stick of wax into little shavings, we weren't actually changing it's state of matter yet. The little shavings are still solid, right? Right.

Next, we took a sheet of wax paper and laid it on top of a dish towel on a hard surface. [Definitely NOT one of the best dish towels in the drawer, since the crayon may bleed as it turns to liquid!] On the sheet of wax paper, we sprinkled little crayon shavings.

We placed  another sheet of wax paper on top of the first sheet, so the crayon shavings were sandwiched between the two sheets. I placed another dish towel on top. The whole stack was assembled on our countertop. [We have granite, which can absorb heat. I wouldn’t recommend doing this on any sort of plastic or synthetic surface!]

Using the hot iron, I pressed down on one corner of the wax paper for about 3 seconds. Then I moved to the next spot and pressed the hot iron until I’d heated the entire surface of the wax paper. A quick check revealed that the hot iron had indeed turned the solid crayon into colorful swirls of liquid!

I showed the kids their liquid suncatchers and we watched them cool back into solids. As they did so, the two sheets of wax paper were nicely glued together. As a finishing touch, and in keeping with the spirit of autumn, we cut our wax paper into leaf shapes and strung the suncatchers onto a garland that now graces our patio door.

This was a really fun, simple and effective project! The kids loved seeing their crayons do a state of matter transfer from solid to liquid and back again. And the final effect is really quite lovely.