Activity Instructions

1. Have your students work in pairs or trios to contemplate the images on Wonders of Nature: Water, using the conversation questions to guide their discussion.
2. After a few moments, call on groups to share about their discussions. Allow the conversation to go in unexpected places, while encouraging students to connect what they deduced about life in the pond to all life on earth: the properties of water are an example of the fine-tuning of the universe.
3. Together, reflect on how water reveals beauty, originality, and simplicity. The qualities of water bear witness to God.
4. You may wish to show the short videos found at SophiaOnline.org/HowDoesWaterFreeze and SophiaOnline.org/HowDoesWaterMoveUpATree for more fascinating qualities of water, with a chemistry teacher present to answer follow-up questions.

Answer Key

1. Three: Solid, liquid, and gas. Students should observe frost on the grass in the pasture (solid), the band of clear air between the grass and the fog (water as a gas, also known as water vapor), and the fog (which contains condensed water vapor as tiny droplets of liquid water).
2. The pasture was warm, and therefore water vapor from the plants and the soil was evaporating into the air. This is a familiar sight every Fall. Note: If you can have a chemistry teacher join for this lesson, they might share that when a cold front moved in, the air that was below the freezing temperature of water met with this water vapor and some of it froze on the plants (frost), while some of it condensed to form the fog. The reason that vapor is still in the air is that water has a very high specific heat, meaning much energy must be taken from the water before it changes temperature. This is due to the hydrogen bonds present between water molecules. Therefore, the water in the soil that was sheltered from the cold wind is still at a temperature above freezing, allowing water vapor to continue to be released into the air.
3. Some students may know that frozen water is less dense than liquid water. Allow students to guess if they do not know. There is no other element or compound that occurs in all three states of matter on earth, at temperatures found in nature that are conducive to life.
4. Some students may know that frozen water is less dense than liquid water. Allow students to guess if they do not know.
5. At the top of the glass. Ice always floats in water. Other examples may include icebergs or frozen tops of lakes on which to go ice skating.
6. All the living things dependent on the pond would die. Water uniquely makes life on earth possible.
7. Our faith reveals to us that God was (and still is) intimately involved in His creation. The Book of Genesis details how God personally and actively created by speaking, separating, and placing the various parts of the world, in essence, fine-tuning things to be a home for human beings, the pinnacle of creation. Scientific details, such as the precise nature of water and the molecules that make it up, and its necessity for all life on earth (and in the universe at least as we know it) support this biblical view.