States of matter

Solids, liquids and gases, and the changes between them: melting, freezing, evaporation, condensation, even sublimation. Twenty clues tie each word to something students have seen, like drops on a cold glass or steam from a kettle, which makes the matching and bingo games a quick check of real understanding.

Games with this list

• Clue Bingo
• Match Up
• Summit Scramble
• I Have, Who Has?
• Talk Around It
• Act, Draw or Say
• Claim the Grid
• Quiz Night

The list

	Clue	Answer
1	Keeps its own shape, like an ice cube	Solid
2	Takes the shape of its container and can be poured	Liquid
3	Spreads out to fill any space	Gas
4	When a solid turns into a liquid	Melting
5	When a liquid turns into a solid	Freezing
6	When a liquid turns into a gas	Evaporation
7	When a gas turns into a liquid, like drops on a cold glass	Condensation
8	The temperature at which a liquid boils	Boiling point
9	The amount of matter in an object	Mass
10	The amount of space something takes up	Volume
11	Anything that has mass and takes up space	Matter
12	Tiny building blocks that everything is made of	Atoms
13	Water in the form of a gas	Water vapor
14	When a solid turns straight into a gas, like dry ice	Sublimation
15	How hot or cold something is	Temperature
16	A mix where one thing disappears into another, like sugar in water	Solution
17	What sugar does when you stir it into warm water	Dissolve
18	A tool that measures temperature	Thermometer
19	Most things get bigger when heated; this is called	Expansion
20	Water at 0 °C becomes this	Ice

More science topics

• Planets and the solar system
• The human body
• Animal groups and habitats
• The first 20 elements
• Plants and how they grow
• Weather and the water cycle
• Rocks and the Earth
• Dinosaurs