Winter Wonderland, Activities before Winter Break! Featuring Coordinate Grids and Crystal Snowflakes

If your school is anything like mine, there are tons of activities right before winter break.  It is hard to get anything taught, let alone keep students engaged and behaved.  So this week I decided to just Let it Go!
On Monday, we had Polar Express Day, which is held by our librarian, and we all were pajamas.  We had shortened class periods so we began our Crystal Snowflake Experiment.  I took on the role of a science teacher and we discuss the important vocabulary that would be seen in our experiment.  These words included solubility, solution, boiling point, pore space to name a few.  We discussed what would be occurring tomorrow in science terms.  We also watched a few short videos about solutions and dissolving substances into water. The next day we put our plan in action! I had asked parents to send jars the week before and I had one jar per person.  Side note, the pint sized wide mouthed mason jars as well as the common chip dip jars work the best.  Bigger jars require A LOT of water and A LOT of Borax soap, so if you have extra jars like I did, I just made them trade their jar for a smaller one.  We also used colored pipe cleaners instead of food coloring and it worked out amazingly!
I boiled the water and put the water into the jar.  Students then put in 3 tablespoons of Borax for each cup of water and stirred. Not all the soap will dissolve and that is okay.  We then put our jars in an empty room and left them overnight.  The next day, Wednesday, revealed awesome crystals that students could use for ornaments on their tree!