Cooling Materials Down Video

What Happens to Materials as They Cool?

Are you looking to teach your students what happens to different substances as they cool? If you’re short on time and want to avoid the potential classroom mess, then Teach Starter can help!

Introducing our series of science demonstration videos about materials and their properties! Simply sign in to your Teach Starter account, project the video page, and hit play! This video resource is available to watch again and again with your Teach Starter subscription, so you can share it with multiple science classes.

In this two-minute video, your students will observe what happens to different substances as they cool. Some of the substances featured in the video include water, chocolate, jelly and custard.

As they watch the video, various multiple-choice questions will be presented on the screen for the students to answer. These include:

1. What happens to runny chocolate when it cools?
2. What happens to steam when it cools?
3. What happens to hot custard when you put it in the fridge?
4. What happens when you put liquid jelly in the fridge?
5. What is the frozen version of water?

We recommend that you pause the video after each question appears and discuss the possible answers as a class. You might even have the students talk in pairs or a small group before sharing their answers (and the scientific reasoning behind them!) with the rest of the class. 

By the end of the lesson, your class should be able to identify how certain substances are affected by cooling.

Activities to Accompany This Science Demonstration Video

Are you looking for more ways for your students to explore how cooling affects different substances? Here are some follow-up activity suggestions from our teacher team: 

1. Will It Change? –  Have the students brainstorm a list of different food and drink items, e.g. chocolate, bread, apples, orange juice. Go through each item and discuss what might happen if each was placed in the freezer. Will it change or not?
2. Water Cooling Observation – Have the students observe water as it cools in an ice cube tray. Students could time how long the freezing process takes as well as recording observations at timed intervals.
3. Kitchen Scientist Role-Play – Divide students into small groups and assign each group a different substance, e.g. chocolate, water, steam, custard. Have them act out a scenario where they are kitchen scientists exploring how their assigned substance changes when cooled.

More Properties of Materials Videos

This properties of materials video is one of a series made by our experienced teacher team. Here are some others you might want to pursue and use in your science lessons!