Copyright © 2017 by Michelle Houts
Illustrations copyright © 2017 Elizabeth Zechel
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First Edition
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are from the authors’ imaginations, and used fictitiously.
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Houts, Michelle, author. | Zechel, Elizabeth, illustrator.
Title: Solids, liquids, guess who’s got gas / Michelle Houts ; illustrated
by Elizabeth Zechel.
Other titles: Solids, liquids, guess who’s got gas
Description: First edition. | New York : Sky Pony Press, [2017]. | Series: Lucy’s lab ; 2 | Summary: Lucy learns all about states of matter, and a school field trip and the Fall Harvest Festival gives her the chance to put her new knowledge to good use.
Identifiers: LCCN 2017008966| ISBN 9781510710672 (hardback) | ISBN 9781510710689 (paperback) | ISBN 9781510710696 (ebook) Subjects: | CYAC: Matter—Properties—Fiction. | Harvest festivals—Fiction. | School field trips—Fiction. | Schools—Fiction. | BISAC: JUVENILE FICTION / Science & Technology. | JUVENILE FICTION / Readers / Chapter Books. | JUVENILE FICTION / School & Education. | JUVENILE FICTION / Girls & Women.
Classification: LCC PZ7.H8235 Sol 2017 | DDC [Fic]--dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017008966
Cover illustration by Elizabeth Zechel
Cover design by Sammy Yuen
Printed in the United States of America
Contents
1. Names
2. The Worst Part of the Best Day
3. What’s the Matter?
4. Back at the Lab
5. The Experiment
6. A Trip to the Library
7. A Shocking Discovery
8. A Lesson Learned
9. The Harvest Festival
Chapter One
Names
The sign in front of Granite City Elementary school used to say WELCOME BACK, STUDENTS AND STAFF! But today, all it says is HAR.
From my seat in Room 2-C, I can see Mr. Farmer out there looking through a box for more letters.
Once, when I was in first grade, I asked my dad why a farmer worked at my school. He told me that Mr. Farmer isn’t a farmer. He’s a custodian. Then Dad told me that a long time ago, before people had two names, if there were two people named John, they’d call one John the Baker and the other John the Farmer. So lots of people have last names that are jobs.
In my second grade class, there’s Collin Cook. I bet his great-great-great-great grandfather was a cook. Maybe even for someone famous. And there’s Natalie Shoemaker. Once, I read a story about a man who made shoes and had elves who helped him in the night while he slept.
Mr. Farmer has added a V to the sign, so now it says HARV. I’m guessing he’s putting the name Harvey up there, but I have no idea why. I don’t know anyone named Harvey.
Some of us in Room 2-C don’t have jobs for last names. Like me. I’m Lucinda Marie Watkins. Everyone calls me Lucy, and I have never even asked what a Watkins is.
And, there’s Miss Flippo. I have no clue what a Flippo is, but it sounds kind of like a clown. I would never, ever, ever tell Miss Flippo that, though. She’s the best and smartest teacher I’ve ever had.
Right now, Miss Flippo is writing this week’s spelling words on the whiteboard, and we’re supposed to copy them down in our spelling journals. You might be worried that I’m not paying attention, but it’s okay. I can listen and think at the same time.
Mom calls me a good multitasker. It’s a good thing I’m a good multitasker, because Mr. Farmer has added an E to the sign, and I’m not going to stop looking out that window until I know who this Harvey person is and why he’s important enough to get his name on the school sign.
“Three minutes until recess, class,” Miss Flippo announces.
I hurry to get the last six spelling words written into my journal. I never want to miss recess, especially when it’s outside. Outside is my favorite place to be. That’s because outside is where nature is. And nature is fascinating.
The bell rings just as I get the very last word down.
Behind me, my best friend and only cousin, Cora, leaps out of her seat. Her pink tutu skirt flits and flounces as we speed-walk to recess. We always follow the “No Running” rule.
“I can’t wait!” she says. “What are you going to be?”
“Be?” I ask. “Cora, what are you talking about?”
Cora sighs. “Lucy, I’m talking about the best day ever!”
She points across the playground to the front of the school. Mr. Farmer steps back from the sign, picks up his box of letters, and heads toward the office.
Now the sign says: HARVEST FESTIVAL, OCTOBER 15TH.
That’s much better than a visit from some guy named Harvey!
Chapter Two
The Worst Part of the Best Day
“What’s a Harvest Festival?” Georgia from Alabama asks Cora and me, her swing whooshing past mine, and then past Cora’s.
I had forgotten that since Georgia just moved here at the beginning of school, she doesn’t know anything about Granite City Elementary School’s biggest event of the year.
“It’s a whole day of games—” I try to yell back to Georgia as her swing passes mine again.
“—and rides—” Cora adds.
Georgia whooshes by again. “I can’t hear you!”
“—and food and—” I holler.
“What did you say?” Georgia yells over her shoulder.
Whoosh!
This is not working. “STOP!”
I plant both feet in the gray gravel and grind my swing to a halt.
Georgia does the same. Cora taps her feet lightly on the stones, taking three passes to slow down enough to stop. She’s wearing her favorite pink shoes, and I know she would be sad if she got them all messed up in the gravel.
When we’re all stopped, I say, “Okay, ready?”
Cora nods. Georgia from Alabama nods, too.
“On three. One. Two. Three!”
We all pull back on our chains and lift our feet at the very same time. At last! We’re swinging together. Much better.
“The Harvest Festival is awesome!” Cora tells Georgia on our upswing.
“The whole town comes!” I say as we glide back.
Georgia is between us, and her head is turning left and then right to hear Cora and me.
“And you can win prizes!” Cora, up, tutu up. (It’s a good thing she wears pink shorts under those tutu skirts.)
“And there’s a Cake Walk.” Me, back.
“And a contest for the best costume!” Cora, up.
Even though it’s my turn, and Georgia is lo
oking right at me, I don’t say a word.
I don’t like dressing up in costumes. I never know what to dress up as and every year, at the very last minute, my mother comes up from the basement with something that will turn me into something I didn’t ask to be.
In Kindergarten, I went to the Harvest Festival as a mouse. I wore a gray sweat suit with felt ears and a long tail my mom made. In first grade, when Cora’s mom, Aunt Darian, offered to make matching princess dresses for us, I told a little fib and said I already had a costume picked out, even though I didn’t. That year, I was the most unoriginal farmer anyone had ever seen. Blue overalls, flannel shirt, straw hat, stuffed pig under one arm.
Whoosh!
Somehow, we’ve gotten out of rhythm again. Georgia’s swing whizzes right by me.
“I said, what are you going to dress up as?” she calls over her shoulder.
I pass her on my way up.
“I don’t know. But I’ll think of something!”
Chapter Three
What’s the Matter?
In the afternoon, Miss Flippo is waiting for us when we get back from art class.
The first thing I notice is that the Science Lab is all rearranged. I think we are the luckiest second graders on the whole planet, because Miss Flippo was an astronaut once, and she really did get to go to space. She calls us her “scientists,” and we have a real Science Lab in our classroom.
Our first science unit was all about habitats. Miss Flippo let us change Room 2-C into a woodland forest, a desert, the Arctic, a rainforest, and an ocean. I was so happy to be in the desert group—even though awful Stewart Swinefest was also in it—because brown is my favorite color and there’re so many different kinds of brown in the desert. But last week, we helped Miss Flippo take down all of the habitats, and she promised we’d love our new science unit just as much.
“Hurry to your seats,” Miss Flippo says. “We have a lot to do this afternoon.”
Stewart, sitting behind me on my right, groans and slouches in his seat. But I sit up straight and tall. I want Miss Flippo to know I’m ready to hear anything she has to tell us about science. It’s my favorite subject in the world.
“Today, scientists,” she says, “we’re going to talk about matter.”
Stewart sits up a little straighter. “What’s the matter?” He snorts. “Get it? Matter?”
I roll my eyes at him, but he’s too busy laughing at his own joke to see.
Miss Flippo smiles. “I knew someone would say that. But, it’s actually the question of the day. What is matter?”
Natalie raises her hand, and Miss Flippo calls on her.
“Is it a problem?” Natalie asks.
Miss Flippo nods her head. “You mean, like when we say, ‘What’s the matter with Joe today?’”
“Yes, like that,” Natalie replies.
“That’s one way to use the word,” Miss Flippo tells us. “But here’s another way to think of matter.”
Miss Flippo reaches into a large bag on her desk. It wasn’t there before we left the classroom for art class, or I would have noticed.
“Tessa and Eddie, please give a cup to every student.”
When Tessa and Eddie have finished passing out the cups, Miss Flippo reaches into her bag and pulls out two big bottles of root beer.
“I love root beer!” Manuel says, and most of us agree.
“Me, too!”
“It’s my favorite!”
I love root beer, too. Root beer is another one of those wonderful brown things.
“Lucy,” Miss Flippo says, “I’d like you and Gavin to very carefully pour some root beer into each cup.”
I hurry to help, but once I start pouring, I slow down and take my time, so I don’t spill any. Logan is the only one who doesn’t want root beer. He says he only likes the taste of orange pop.
“Can we drink it now?” Stewart asks, almost before Gavin has finished pouring the last cup.
“Not yet,” Miss Flippo says. While I was busying pouring, Miss Flippo had written three words on the whiteboard:
SOLID
LIQUID
GAS
“Look at what’s in your cup,” Miss Flippo says. “Is the root beer solid?” She holds her cup up and lets the root beer slosh around a little bit.
“No!” the class answers in unison.
“It’s liquid!” Heather says.
“That’s right.” Miss Flippo nods. “Now, what shape is your root beer?”
Shape? I stare at the liquid in my cup. It’s not a circle, even though my cup is round. It’s definitely not a square. It’s kind of …
“Cup-shaped!” Brody calls out the same answer I was thinking.
“Indeed. Liquid takes the shape of the container it’s in.”
Stewart has his face down over his cup, and the tip of his freckled nose is almost touching his root beer. “Now?” he asks. “Now can we drink it?”
Miss Flippo smiles. “I think you’ll want to wait for this next part, Stewart.”
She reaches into her bag once more and produces a tub of vanilla ice cream and a round metal scoop.
Room 2-C goes wild!
“This ice cream has been in the freezer all day,” she tells us. She takes off the lid and runs the metal scoop over the surface of the ice cream. I can tell she’s pushing hard because she twists up her mouth and stands on her toes.
Miss Flippo carefully plops a perfect round ball of frozen ice cream into an empty cup and holds it up for all of us to see.
“I’ll ask you the same question I asked about the root beer. Is this ice cream solid?”
I look at the ball of ice cream. Its shape is still round, even though the cup is—like Brody said—cup-shaped.
Almost everyone answers yes. But Ming and I are thinking the same thing.
“But it’s soft,” Ming says, and I nod.
“You’re right,” Miss Flippo says. “It is soft, but look at the shape. While it’s still cold, it holds its own shape, right?”
Sure enough, the ice cream is still in a perfect ball.
“So it is a solid!” Ming decides.
“Yes, it’s a solid. And being soft is another of its properties,” Miss Flippo says.
Now Stewart isn’t the only one getting antsy. Most of Room 2-C has figured out that Miss Flippo is giving us root beer floats, and we can’t wait to eat them!
“Now?” Stewart cries.
Miss Flippo holds up one finger to tell him to be just a little more patient. “There’s one more thing you need to see.”
She carefully empties the cup with the perfect solid ball of ice cream into her cup with liquid root beer and we all ooh when the fizz bubbles almost to the top.
“Where did all that foam come from?” Miss Flippo asks. “There were only two parts: root beer and ice cream. But now there are three.”
Ajay raised his hand. “The foam came from the bubbles in the root beer.”
“That’s right, Ajay. Do you think there would be any foam if we added a scoop of ice cream to water?”
“No!” Room 2-C answers, all together.
“The bubbles in root beer, and in all pop, are actually air bubbles. And air is not a solid, right?”
“Right!”
“And air is not a liquid, right?”
“Right!”
Miss Flippo points to the three words on the board. “So, air must be a—”
“Gas!”
Miss Flippo is beaming. “What smart second graders you are!” she exclaims.
Collin raises his hand.
“Collin?”
“We may be smart, but we’re also starving! Can we have root beer floats now?”
Chapter Four
Back at the Lab
After school, Cousin Cora and I go straight to my lab.
It’s actually my old playhouse, but after Miss Flippo showed me how cool it is to have a science lab, I took out all the toys that my little brother, Thomas, and I had put in there, and I added
science-y stuff. Except Miss Flippo doesn’t like the word stuff. She says it’s not very specific, and stuff can be anything in the world.
Hmm. The new word we learned today—matter—is kind of stuff, except matter isn’t anything in the world. It’s everything in the world!
Cora is looking at all my specimens. I have to admit, I’ve started quite a collection since the beginning of the school year. I’ve got rocks and leaves and some pinecones from the park.
“Oh! What on earth happened to that gorgeous creature?” Cora cries, and I already know what she’s talking about before I even look up.
It’s a yellow, blue, and black Swallowtail butterfly that was already dead when I carefully peeled it off the grill of Dad’s pickup truck. Right away I looked up what kind of butterfly it is. It’s called a Swallowtail because the backs of its wings look the tail of a swallow. I didn’t know what a swallow looked like, either, so I had to look that up next, and sure enough, a swallow is a bird that has a tail that looks just like this butterfly.
“Butterfly versus truck,” I explain to Cora. “Truck won.”
Cora uses one fingertip to stroke the butterfly’s delicate wings. “That’s so sad,” she says.
“I know,” I agree. “But at least now we can study it.” I hand Cora the magnifying glass I borrowed from Mom’s desk.
“Look at that!” Cora says, leaning close to the butterfly. “I thought it was just yellow and black with a little blue, but look. I see red, too. Do you?”
I don’t see any red, but I look anyway when she passes me the magnifying glass. I move the glass up and down and all around until I zero in on the butterfly’s tail. Or tails. It actually has two, one on each side of its middle. “Hey, you’re right. I see a tiny bit of red on each of its tails.”
Cora smiles.
“Good job, Cora! You are becoming a real scientist!”
“I never knew science could be so”—Cora twirls around, being dramatic—“so COLORFUL!”
The library is open late on Tuesday evenings, which means Aunt Darian has to work late, and that means Cora gets to eat supper with us most Tuesdays. Tonight, Dad is trying out a new pasta recipe, and I know it’ll be good because Dad’s probably the best cook in Granite City.
Solids, Liquids, Guess Who's Got Gas? Page 1
