December Stem Lesson

Instead of making Christmas crafts this year.  Second grade grew Crystals and studied the water cycle.  Planning began by creating a text set.  We selected the following books from scholastic. Included were below, on-lovel, and advanced texts.  

A Drop of Water
Rain
Growing Crystals
Down Comes the Rain
Water Cycle 
The Water Cycle

Next came the fun part. Identifying and refining the big project. We pulled the Crystal Tree idea from "Pinterest."   We also included a simple related experiment.  

This is result of dipping black construction paper into a salt water solution and then allowing time for the water to evaporate.

After just a couple of hours, this is what our crystal Christmas trees looked like.

We added a few drops of food coloring to  the tips before adding the liquid solution to give the crystals some color.

At the end of the school day our card board trees were almost completely covered.