Chapter 5: Counting the Treasure
Correlation Coloring Page
"When the sun is hot, ice cream melts!"
A picture of an ice cream cone next to a picture of the sun. An arrow connects them.
About this page
An ice cream cone, a blazing sun, and one arrow between them, page 71 draws its big idea with almost no words at all. This is correlation, the discovery that two things change together. Hot days and melty ice cream travel as a pair, and children have already collected years of sticky evidence proving it. Noticing when-this-then-that connections is one of the deepest thinking skills in the whole book, and the way a child talks through this page can tell you a lot, which is part of why coloring doubles as gentle assessment. The arrow is small, but the idea is enormous.
The research skill
Telling the difference between things that happen together and one thing causing another is the skill behind this arrow. Here, the sunglasses-wearing sun really does make the ice cream melt, and you can test it. But many pairs only travel together: ice cream sales and sunburns both rise in summer, yet ice cream does not cause sunburn, because warm sunny weather drives both. Researchers draw a cause arrow only after checking. Chapter 5 is where the Squad reads patterns carefully, and this question returns in every science class.
Try it at home
Test the page's arrow with two ice cubes, with an adult helping. Set one cube on a plate in a sunny window or outside in the sun, and an identical cube on a plate in the shade. Your child predicts which will melt first, then checks every five minutes and draws what each cube looks like. When one is gone, talk it over: did the sun make the difference? What else was kept the same for both cubes, and why did that matter for a fair answer?
Talk about it while you color
- What happens to your ice cream when you eat it outside on a hot day?
- Can you think of two other things that always seem to happen together?
- On a freezing snowy day, what do you think would happen to this ice cream cone?