One Year 4 science topic taught nine ways, one lesson in each PICRAT cell, with tools and practical work that suit eight- and nine-year-olds. Each lesson fits a different point in the unit, from first sorting to modelling what the particles do.
By Andy Perryer, Director of Education Innovation9 lessonsReviewed September 2026
Creative Replace
States of matter: a material fact card with its melting temperature, made in Canva
Grade 3 (Year 4, age 8 to 9)
· 60 min
· 1 device per child
Year 4 are learning that every material has its own melting temperature. The teacher shares out ten materials from a fact sheet: oxygen (minus 219°C), mercury (minus 39°C), water (0°C), chocolate (about 34°C), candle wax (about 60°C), lead (327°C), aluminium (660°C), salt (801°C), gold (1,064°C) and iron (1,538°C). In Canva for Education, on class accounts, each child starts from a blank card-sized page and designs a fact card for one material: its name, a picture made with Canva's draw tool, its state at a room temperature of 20°C, its melting temperature and one use that depends on its state, such as liquid mercury in old thermometers. No templates are used. The teacher checks the facts on each card after the lesson and prints the set, and next lesson groups deal the cards and race to lay them in order from the lowest melting temperature to the highest. Last year the class made the same cards with felt pens on blank index cards.
The Year 2 teacher has sent Year 4 five questions her class asked during a wet week: where does a puddle go, why does my ice lolly drip, why does the bathroom mirror go foggy, why does washing dry faster on a sunny day, and why does chocolate melt in my pocket? Each pair takes one question and writes a 45-second script that uses the right words, such as evaporate, water vapour, condense and melt, and gives one example a six-year-old will know. Pairs record their answer with the audio recorder in GarageBand on a school iPad, listen back, and re-record any part that is rushed or uses a word Year 2 will not understand. No names are spoken on the recordings. The teacher checks every answer for the science and saves the files to the school's shared drive, and the Year 2 teacher plays them to her class from her own device over the following week. Year 4 finish by listening to two answers and agreeing what made them easy to follow.
In the summer term, after their Scratch unit in computing, Year 4 pairs spend three lessons building a working model of water changing state, on class accounts managed by the teacher. The starter project gives them a container, a temperature slider running from minus 20 to 120, a particle sprite that makes 24 clones of itself in rows, a block that sends a clone back to its own place, and the two temperature checks ready-made, leaving three empty gaps: below 0, from 0 to 100 and above 100. Pairs write what a particle does in each gap, such as jiggling on the spot, gliding slowly around the bottom of the container, or moving fast and bouncing off every wall. Another pair then drags the slider up and down hunting for things real water never does, such as a gas that stays spread out when it is cooled or ice whose particles have wandered out of their rows, and the authors rework their rules. In the last lesson pairs change the two numbers to model mercury, which melts at minus 39°C and boils at 357°C, and tell the class one way their model is unlike real water.
Year 4 have met the four changes of state and now practise telling them apart. The teacher sets a Seesaw activity built from the class's usual cut-and-stick sheet, with four headed boxes, melting, freezing, evaporating and condensing, and eight pictures to drag into them: an ice lolly dripping, chocolate going soft in a pocket, water in an ice-cube tray in the freezer, wax hardening down the side of a candle, a puddle drying up, washing drying on a line, a bathroom mirror misting over and drops forming on a cold drink can. The wax is the trap, because it turns solid at about 60°C with no freezer in sight. Pairs share a tablet, agree where each picture goes and type one sentence under the mirror and the wax saying what changed into what. The teacher works with a guided group meanwhile, looks through the submitted pages after the lesson and plans the next day's starter from the pictures most pairs misplaced.
Year 4 are investigating whether temperature changes how fast ice melts. The teacher prepares jugs of water at about 10°C, 20°C, 30°C and 40°C. Each pair pours 200 ml from one jug into a clear cup, reads its temperature with a thermometer, drops in one ice cube from the same tray and times it with a stopwatch until no ice is left; the pairs with the coldest water start first, because theirs takes longest. In a shared Google Sheet, opened on school accounts, pairs type their temperature and their time in seconds into a row named by table number, and a scatter chart on the board gains a dot for every result. The class watches the dots step downwards as the water gets warmer, and the teacher asks why the dots at one temperature do not sit on top of each other. Children suggest reasons, such as stirring or a bigger cube, and agree one rule to tighten the test. The class then uses the chart to predict the time at 25°C, three pairs test it under the new rule while the rest watch the dots land, and every child writes a conclusion using two results from the chart.
Year 4 can sort materials into three states and now ask why the states behave so differently. Each child first draws what they think the smallest bits of ice, liquid water and water as a gas look like. In pairs on a tablet, they open PhET's States of Matter: Basics and, copying the teacher on the board, switch its thermometer from kelvin to degrees Celsius. They choose water, press Solid and watch the molecules shake on the spot in a fixed pattern. They slide the heater up and hold it until the pattern breaks and the molecules tumble past each other at the bottom of the container, then keep heating until they fly apart and fill it. Pairs then write a prediction for each of three questions and test it: will cooling the gas bring the liquid back, do the molecules themselves get bigger as they warm, and do oxygen and neon behave in the same way as water? The teacher circulates and asks pairs to show on screen the evidence for each answer. Children redraw their three pictures and write what changes between the states and what stays the same.
Year 4 are starting states of matter. On the projector the teacher opens a Microsoft Whiteboard board with three columns, each headed by its rule: a solid keeps its own shape and its volume, a liquid flows and takes the shape of its container but keeps its volume, and a gas spreads out to fill whatever space it is given and can be squashed. Twelve photographs wait at the side: a brick, a wooden spoon, an ice cube and a coin; milk, honey and cooking oil; the air in a football, the helium in a party balloon and the carbon dioxide bubbles in a fizzy drink; and two that cause arguments, sand and a bath sponge. For each one the teacher asks which state it is, children hold up S, L or G on mini whiteboards, and the teacher drags the photograph into its column and says which rule decides it. The teacher spends longest on the sand, which pours but is made of tiny grains that each keep their shape, and the sponge, which squashes because its holes are full of air. Children build the same table in their books as the board fills and finish by writing why sand is a solid.
Year 4 know that water freezes at 0°C and boils at 100°C. Today's question is whether every material can change state. The teacher plays three short clips on the board, chosen in advance on YouTube and shown full screen: iron, which melts at 1,538°C, pouring glowing from a foundry ladle into a mould; a spoon made of gallium, a metal that melts at about 30°C, sagging and running into a mug of warm water; and liquid nitrogen, which boils at minus 196°C, bubbling fiercely in a bowl at room temperature. The teacher pauses each clip and replays the moment of change at quarter speed, using YouTube's playback setting, the iron running like water into the mould, the moment the spoon's bowl sags and the nitrogen boiling away in a room that feels cool to us, and explains that the white mist over the bowl is tiny drops of water from the air, because nitrogen gas cannot be seen. Children mark iron, gallium and nitrogen on a temperature line in their books, not drawn to scale, that already shows 0°C and 100°C, write each one's state at a room temperature of 20°C, and finish with a sentence on what it would take to turn each into a liquid.
Half of Year 4 still say sand is a liquid, because it pours. Two children each tip a jug, one of dry play sand and one of water, from the same height into two clear trays set side by side in front of a sheet of black card, while a school tablet on a stand films close up in slow-motion mode, framed on the jugs, the trays and the children's hands. At full speed the two pours look alike, and the class writes down what it saw: both ran out of the jug and both filled the tray. Then the teacher plays the footage on the board. Slowed down, the sand comes out as separate grains that knock into each other, bounce off the tray, stop where they land and build a heap with sloping sides. The water leaves the jug as one stream, breaks into drops, and the drops join again in the tray, spread to every corner and settle with a flat top. The teacher replays the landing twice and freezes it on one bouncing grain and one drop. Children draw both pours in mid-air and after landing, and write which rule for a solid each grain of sand keeps and the water does not.