Thermometers
Elementary / Language Arts / Reading
Intro to reading a thermometer using Duplos!
Good day boys and girls. My name is Charlie Haffey and I?m an elementary science teacher for the Norwood Public Schools. The title of today?s show is Thermometers. Thermometers. And you?ve used a thermometer before when you wanna see how hot or how cold something is. When we talk about hot and cold, we?re talking about heat energy. Now, all objects have some amount of heat in them. Some less. Some more. For example, you reach into your freezer and you grab one of those Barney popsicles and you say, ?My, this is very cold.? Which means it has less energy than other things in the room. Then you might reach for something that is really hot like this coffee mug, ?Ah! Geez! Boy, is that hot. Holy cow! Man!? That coffee mug there has a lot more heat energy than the little Barney popsicle that I had in the freezer.
Now, a thermometer measures how much heat energy you have. So, let?s look at a thermometer right here. And we?re gonna start way off here at the bottom of the thermometer. And at the bottom of the thermometer what we have is this little glass ball and in here is a red liquid. And you?ll see that there?s a glass tube coming up and the red liquid goes right all the way up. And we get to the very top and here is one of the more important parts of the thermometer we have the side over here has degrees Fahrenheit. This little circle, above and to the left, is a symbol for degrees. And F stands for Fahrenheit and this degrees Fahrenheit, the Fahrenheit temperature scale was invented by a guy by the name of Fahrenheit. And if we look at our little thermometer, we?ll go over here we see this is also the other side is degrees. And it?s degrees C. And that would be for degrees Centigrade or degrees Celsius. Pretty much the same thing. And that was invented by a guy by the name of Celsius.
Now, everybody on the planet Earth, everybody on the planet Earth uses the Celsius temperature scale. Except for us in the United States. We use Fahrenheit. So today we?ll show you how to read a thermometer in Fahrenheit. But before we do that, let?s talk about that heat energy thing. And what we?re gonna do is we?re gonna look at our thermometer here. The liquid that goes in this glass tube and is stored down here, the liquid is rubbing alcohol. Rubbing alcohol, you had it in your arm before you had a shot, or at home if you have a cut you might have an adult put rubbing alcohol on to clean it. They put rubbing alcohol in there and they colored it red to you can see it pretty easily.
Now if you took the smallest amount of rubbing alcohol that you could get, and still have some rubbing alcohol you would have a molecule of rubbing alcohol. The problem is you can?t see it. You just can?t see it. You can?t see one molecule. So, I?m gonna use a model for molecules of alcohol. And I?m gonna be using today one of the most important tool in all of math and science, yes indeed boys and girls, I?m gonna be using Duplos. Duplos! Boys and girls there are no Duplos or Legos inside the thermometer. It is a model. Inside the thermometer is rubbing alcohol.
Now, what I?ve done here is I?m gonna just kinda stack up my little Duplos like this. And you can see how it?s a model of the rubbing alcohol that?s going up and down the tube here. Now what happens is all objects have a certain amount of heat energy. And the objects that have that certain amount of energy they?re moving a little bit. They just move around a little bit. So, what happens is if you look over here, these little molecules of rubbing alcohol, the Duplo models, they?re moving around, and they?re going, ?Doop do doo doop do doo doop do doo.? And when they move around a little bit there?s a tiny little space in between the molecules. Here?s what happens. If you add heat, so if you leave and object out in the sun, you put it in the oven, you put in the toaster, or whatever, what happens is the molecules get more energy instead of going ?Doop do doo,? they start going ?Woah hohoho!? and this is what happens then. The little molecules start going, ?Woah, woah ho!? They start walking around, and they get a little more space in the, and what happens is the thermometer shows that these, the red molecules are going up higher in the tube.
On the opposite hand, if we have something that gets colder. We?re taking heat away. You put something in the freezer, what happens is that the molecules, they just get really cold they don?t move around much at all they move around a lot less and they can get a lot smaller space in between ?em. So we put our model here in the freezer the molecules move so slowly that they can actually squench up together because there?s less space in between the molecules. And that?s why the liquid goes up, and that?s why the liquid goes down in a thermometer.
The thermometers that we use here in class are the thermometers that we can see right here. And, you take a quick little look down here and you?d recognize these from before, it has our name on here. Mr. Ransky and I worked at the Norwood Science Center. That?s our office, the Norwood Science Center. Down here is that little ball and as you go up the thermometer you could see that the Fahrenheit side over here and the Celsius side over here and way up here, we have degrees F and degrees C. Well one thing you?ll notice is that if you go up the Fahrenheit side it goes fifty, sixty, seventy, eighty, ninety. And, that?s okay. You know, it?s a small little scale and if you wanna go through between a number like seventy and eighty, if you had ten little lines each line would be one degree and that would be pretty easy. There?s a problem. There?s only five little lines in between. So, you can?t count by ones. You have to use what we call, when you were little kids, skip counting by twos. I love skip counting by twos.
So, what I?m gonna do here, I?m gonna show in a little model I have. Another little model. Our little thermometer. And I?m gonna do just kinda show you right here that the thermometer temperature were gonna be working with today is gonna be between seventy and eighty degrees Fahrenheit. Between seventy degrees Fahrenheit and eighty degrees Fahrenheit. And the red liquid in the thermometer come right up here and stops at this seventy-degree mark. So, we would simply say that the temperature on that thermometer was measuring heat energy of seventy degrees F. Seventy degrees Fahrenheit.
To go any higher though, to go from seventy to eighty, you have one, two, three, four, five spaces. And then you count by twos so this is seventy-two, seventy-four, seventy-six, seventy-eight, eighty degrees Fahrenheit. Now, to make this simpler for just about everybody. We?re going to be using one of the all-time best tools in Math and Science, and that?s money. I mean, I think just about everybody can count money. Or usually you start counting money at a pretty early age. So, let?s take a look here and let?s say that we got our seventy degree mark right there. Okay? So, that?s our seventy degree mark. So, I?m gonna have a fifty dollar bill, and I?m gonna have my twenty dollar bill, and fifty plus twenty gives me the seventy. So, if I had my thermometer reading seventy degrees, seventy dollars, seventy degrees, that?s pretty straightforward. Okay. But, it doesn?t usually work that well. No, it doesn?t usually work that easily.
So, let me look at another example here. And what I have is I have my thermometer that?s at this line up here, and I?m gonna start off at seventy. Here I have my seventy dollars from before. And that gives me this line right here. Now, remember I?m counting by twos, so I go up this line and this line. So I go up from seventy to this line that?s seventy-two. If I go from seventy-two to this line, it?s seventy-four. It?s just like money. Sometimes, it gets a little bit more complicated that that so let me show you another example. In here, we have a situation where the alcohol in the thermometer has settled down between two of the lines. So, I?ve had students go, ?But Mr. Haffey, it?s between the lines. I don?t know what number that is.? Settle down, alright. Use a little problem solving and think of money. Think of money. So, let?s do the money thing again, alright. So, to go to seventy where I?m starting pretty much, I?m gonna have my fifty, and then my twenty, so that gives me fifty and twenty is seventy. So, I?m gonna start right here. I go to the next line up and that?s seventy-two. I go to the next line up, that?s seventy-four. Now, if I go one more two-dollar bill or one more two degree jump here to seventy-six, I?m too high. Seventy-four degrees too low, seventy-six degrees too high. Seventy-six, seventy-four. What is the number in between seventy-four dollars and seventy-six dollars? If that?s too hard to do the seventies are the same, so you could say what number is between four dollars and six dollars. And boys and girls, the answer is five. Or seventy-five dollars or seventy-five degrees. So, let?s take a look and here we have seventy, so my fifty and twenty is seventy. Seventy-two. Seventy-four. And now if I plunked out one more dollar bill, I have seventy, two, four, five degrees. And it?s as simple as that boys and girls to read the thermometer. Think of it as money.
Now, before we go to the next part of the show, I wanna thank my wife Janet for allowing me to have seventy-six dollars with me today in order to play this thermometer game with you. There?s one more trick though that we have to look at. It?s a little tricky on a thermometer?s part, okay. And let?s take a look down here. And if you?re reading your thermometer, alright. What?s gonna happen is you?re gonna see that sometimes you look at the thermometer and you could see the red alcohol pretty clearly. But if you just look at it from a little different point of view, it looks like the thermometer disappears. It doesn?t disappear but what you need to do kinda move your face around and see where you can find the alcohol in the thermometer the best.
Another thing is what you might wanna do is when you have the thermometer horizontally on the wall, you wanna look at it straight like this. If it?s down on the desk, you wanna lean over and look straight down. If you?re looking at an angle up and down, you?re gonna get the wrong measure. So, in this country we use Fahrenheit. Think of it as money and you are gonna be in business.
So, I hope you have some fun with your thermometers in class. And I?m gonna count my money here to make sure I give all the money back to my wife. Okay. So that?s our show. Thanks for watching.
Fifty, sixty, seventy, two, four, six, eight, eighty. Eighty-one.
Now, a thermometer measures how much heat energy you have. So, let?s look at a thermometer right here. And we?re gonna start way off here at the bottom of the thermometer. And at the bottom of the thermometer what we have is this little glass ball and in here is a red liquid. And you?ll see that there?s a glass tube coming up and the red liquid goes right all the way up. And we get to the very top and here is one of the more important parts of the thermometer we have the side over here has degrees Fahrenheit. This little circle, above and to the left, is a symbol for degrees. And F stands for Fahrenheit and this degrees Fahrenheit, the Fahrenheit temperature scale was invented by a guy by the name of Fahrenheit. And if we look at our little thermometer, we?ll go over here we see this is also the other side is degrees. And it?s degrees C. And that would be for degrees Centigrade or degrees Celsius. Pretty much the same thing. And that was invented by a guy by the name of Celsius.
Now, everybody on the planet Earth, everybody on the planet Earth uses the Celsius temperature scale. Except for us in the United States. We use Fahrenheit. So today we?ll show you how to read a thermometer in Fahrenheit. But before we do that, let?s talk about that heat energy thing. And what we?re gonna do is we?re gonna look at our thermometer here. The liquid that goes in this glass tube and is stored down here, the liquid is rubbing alcohol. Rubbing alcohol, you had it in your arm before you had a shot, or at home if you have a cut you might have an adult put rubbing alcohol on to clean it. They put rubbing alcohol in there and they colored it red to you can see it pretty easily.
Now if you took the smallest amount of rubbing alcohol that you could get, and still have some rubbing alcohol you would have a molecule of rubbing alcohol. The problem is you can?t see it. You just can?t see it. You can?t see one molecule. So, I?m gonna use a model for molecules of alcohol. And I?m gonna be using today one of the most important tool in all of math and science, yes indeed boys and girls, I?m gonna be using Duplos. Duplos! Boys and girls there are no Duplos or Legos inside the thermometer. It is a model. Inside the thermometer is rubbing alcohol.
Now, what I?ve done here is I?m gonna just kinda stack up my little Duplos like this. And you can see how it?s a model of the rubbing alcohol that?s going up and down the tube here. Now what happens is all objects have a certain amount of heat energy. And the objects that have that certain amount of energy they?re moving a little bit. They just move around a little bit. So, what happens is if you look over here, these little molecules of rubbing alcohol, the Duplo models, they?re moving around, and they?re going, ?Doop do doo doop do doo doop do doo.? And when they move around a little bit there?s a tiny little space in between the molecules. Here?s what happens. If you add heat, so if you leave and object out in the sun, you put it in the oven, you put in the toaster, or whatever, what happens is the molecules get more energy instead of going ?Doop do doo,? they start going ?Woah hohoho!? and this is what happens then. The little molecules start going, ?Woah, woah ho!? They start walking around, and they get a little more space in the, and what happens is the thermometer shows that these, the red molecules are going up higher in the tube.
On the opposite hand, if we have something that gets colder. We?re taking heat away. You put something in the freezer, what happens is that the molecules, they just get really cold they don?t move around much at all they move around a lot less and they can get a lot smaller space in between ?em. So we put our model here in the freezer the molecules move so slowly that they can actually squench up together because there?s less space in between the molecules. And that?s why the liquid goes up, and that?s why the liquid goes down in a thermometer.
The thermometers that we use here in class are the thermometers that we can see right here. And, you take a quick little look down here and you?d recognize these from before, it has our name on here. Mr. Ransky and I worked at the Norwood Science Center. That?s our office, the Norwood Science Center. Down here is that little ball and as you go up the thermometer you could see that the Fahrenheit side over here and the Celsius side over here and way up here, we have degrees F and degrees C. Well one thing you?ll notice is that if you go up the Fahrenheit side it goes fifty, sixty, seventy, eighty, ninety. And, that?s okay. You know, it?s a small little scale and if you wanna go through between a number like seventy and eighty, if you had ten little lines each line would be one degree and that would be pretty easy. There?s a problem. There?s only five little lines in between. So, you can?t count by ones. You have to use what we call, when you were little kids, skip counting by twos. I love skip counting by twos.
So, what I?m gonna do here, I?m gonna show in a little model I have. Another little model. Our little thermometer. And I?m gonna do just kinda show you right here that the thermometer temperature were gonna be working with today is gonna be between seventy and eighty degrees Fahrenheit. Between seventy degrees Fahrenheit and eighty degrees Fahrenheit. And the red liquid in the thermometer come right up here and stops at this seventy-degree mark. So, we would simply say that the temperature on that thermometer was measuring heat energy of seventy degrees F. Seventy degrees Fahrenheit.
To go any higher though, to go from seventy to eighty, you have one, two, three, four, five spaces. And then you count by twos so this is seventy-two, seventy-four, seventy-six, seventy-eight, eighty degrees Fahrenheit. Now, to make this simpler for just about everybody. We?re going to be using one of the all-time best tools in Math and Science, and that?s money. I mean, I think just about everybody can count money. Or usually you start counting money at a pretty early age. So, let?s take a look here and let?s say that we got our seventy degree mark right there. Okay? So, that?s our seventy degree mark. So, I?m gonna have a fifty dollar bill, and I?m gonna have my twenty dollar bill, and fifty plus twenty gives me the seventy. So, if I had my thermometer reading seventy degrees, seventy dollars, seventy degrees, that?s pretty straightforward. Okay. But, it doesn?t usually work that well. No, it doesn?t usually work that easily.
So, let me look at another example here. And what I have is I have my thermometer that?s at this line up here, and I?m gonna start off at seventy. Here I have my seventy dollars from before. And that gives me this line right here. Now, remember I?m counting by twos, so I go up this line and this line. So I go up from seventy to this line that?s seventy-two. If I go from seventy-two to this line, it?s seventy-four. It?s just like money. Sometimes, it gets a little bit more complicated that that so let me show you another example. In here, we have a situation where the alcohol in the thermometer has settled down between two of the lines. So, I?ve had students go, ?But Mr. Haffey, it?s between the lines. I don?t know what number that is.? Settle down, alright. Use a little problem solving and think of money. Think of money. So, let?s do the money thing again, alright. So, to go to seventy where I?m starting pretty much, I?m gonna have my fifty, and then my twenty, so that gives me fifty and twenty is seventy. So, I?m gonna start right here. I go to the next line up and that?s seventy-two. I go to the next line up, that?s seventy-four. Now, if I go one more two-dollar bill or one more two degree jump here to seventy-six, I?m too high. Seventy-four degrees too low, seventy-six degrees too high. Seventy-six, seventy-four. What is the number in between seventy-four dollars and seventy-six dollars? If that?s too hard to do the seventies are the same, so you could say what number is between four dollars and six dollars. And boys and girls, the answer is five. Or seventy-five dollars or seventy-five degrees. So, let?s take a look and here we have seventy, so my fifty and twenty is seventy. Seventy-two. Seventy-four. And now if I plunked out one more dollar bill, I have seventy, two, four, five degrees. And it?s as simple as that boys and girls to read the thermometer. Think of it as money.
Now, before we go to the next part of the show, I wanna thank my wife Janet for allowing me to have seventy-six dollars with me today in order to play this thermometer game with you. There?s one more trick though that we have to look at. It?s a little tricky on a thermometer?s part, okay. And let?s take a look down here. And if you?re reading your thermometer, alright. What?s gonna happen is you?re gonna see that sometimes you look at the thermometer and you could see the red alcohol pretty clearly. But if you just look at it from a little different point of view, it looks like the thermometer disappears. It doesn?t disappear but what you need to do kinda move your face around and see where you can find the alcohol in the thermometer the best.
Another thing is what you might wanna do is when you have the thermometer horizontally on the wall, you wanna look at it straight like this. If it?s down on the desk, you wanna lean over and look straight down. If you?re looking at an angle up and down, you?re gonna get the wrong measure. So, in this country we use Fahrenheit. Think of it as money and you are gonna be in business.
So, I hope you have some fun with your thermometers in class. And I?m gonna count my money here to make sure I give all the money back to my wife. Okay. So that?s our show. Thanks for watching.
Fifty, sixty, seventy, two, four, six, eight, eighty. Eighty-one.