Making Mineral Crystals - Year 2

Apologies for the lack of updates.  Extracurricular activities and the three preps are preventing me from managing my time well.  Anyways, we are approaching the halfway point of our course;  new student blogs will be up as well as the first blog awards handed out.  For now, it's lab time:

We're into year 2 of the making crystals challenge.  We have added a little scientific inquiry to this with a variable and control.  Looking good thus far - here's the first and only picture I got from day 1 of the lab:

Fig 1:  It's snowing, again, eh?

Good old sodium chlorate.  These crystals are formed from being in a saturated solution that was heated, and we're observing the cooling process which will end up forming crystals.

A few students connected this to minerals being created from magma, which is a similar process.  They could see the 'crust' developing on the surface where it's coolest, and they can see the denser minerals drop to the bottom of the beaker.

Looks like part 1 is done, and we'll see what the students can do the following week!