Kindergarten · Science · week 35

Design: keep the ice cube longest

Design and test a solution that measurably delays ice melting compared to an unprotected control cube.

This is your final design challenge: use everything you know about sun, shade, and shelter to protect an ice cube and make it last as long as possible.

You need one ice cube with no protection at all, so you have something fair to compare your protected ice cube against.

📋 For the teacher
Teach it (10–15 min):
  • Offer a variety of real materials: cloth, foil, cardboard, cups, anything safe to experiment with.
  • Insist on the unprotected control cube, even if your child wants to skip it.
  • Time both cubes together and check in at the same moments.
  • Treat any result, success or not, as useful real data, and ask what you would try next.
Talk about it:
  • What materials did you choose, and why?
  • Did your design work better than no protection at all?
  • What would you try differently next time?

Mastery looks like: They build a design that measurably delays ice melting compared to an unprotected control cube and explain the sun-and-shade reasoning behind it.

Common stumbles: Skipping the unprotected control cube, which makes it impossible to know if the design really worked; choosing materials that do not actually block sunlight or warmth.

Homework for this lessonType it, write it with a stylus, or print it for pencil & paper.open →
Records attendance + 15 min of Science for this learner.
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