Snow and clay: water in its forms and materials

Brief

This lesson asks you to assess how changes of state of liquids and solids affect people and environments, and to classify solid materials by whether they absorb or repel water. The museum offers one account of snow in a city and one example of a material that takes in water; your class will test buoyancy and compare many more materials. ¹

What did the snow change for people?

Think about what a solid form of water makes people do. List what changed in the streets and on the roofs, and what would happen when the snow melted.

Does this material take in water or turn it away?

Drop a little water on each material and watch. Sort the materials into those that absorb water and those that repel it, and say how you know.

Go deeper

Snow fell at Baghdad on Wednesday the eleventh of Rabi' I 398. It lay a cubit deep in places and a cubit and a half. It stayed a week unmelted, and people shovelled it from their roofs into the streets and lanes. Traces remained some twenty days ². The record cites the history al-Muntazam by Ibn al-Jawzi for this.

Think about it

People shovelled the snow from their roofs into the streets. Why might they have done that, and what do you think happened to the snow once it melted?

Into the museum

The Great Snowfall of Baghdad in 398: the whole account, and the towns the snow reached.
Unglazed earthenware: pitchers that stored water and kept it cool by evaporation.

Try this

Read the cards on The Great Snowfall of Baghdad in 398 and on unglazed earthenware. Draw one thing in each card that shows water as a solid or a liquid, and say what people did about it.