For more than an hour Monday morning, the noise of glass shattering against linoleum could be heard coming from Stephanie Montoya’s first-grade classroom.

But students weren’t breaking windows.

They were breaking hot dogs and flowers instead.

Monday, the Bend Science Station stopped by a first-grade dual language immersion classroom at Bear Elementary School to teach students a lesson on liquid nitrogen. David Bermudez, the station’s executive director, conducted the lesson entirely in Spanish, which is a first for the science station.

“Before any special activity, the kids always ask me whether it will be in English and Spanish,” Montoya said. “When I told them that this lesson would be in Spanish, they started cheering.”

The dual language immersion program is in its third year at the school, with six classes total participating in the program. Each class is comprised of equal parts native English speakers and native Spanish speakers, with most classes conducted primarily in Spanish at this stage in the program.

David Bermudez and his wife, Lisa Bermudez, visited the school as part of a larger plan to bring science to Title 1 schools. The visit was funded by a grant from the Clabough Foundation, which has allowed every Bear Creek classroom a visit from the science station. Next year, students will also be able to visit the science station as part of the grant.

David Bermudez’s father immigrated from Colombia, and though he didn’t speak much Spanish at home growing up, he studied the language in school. He taught Monday’s lesson in Spanish because he wanted to provide students in the dual immersion classes with a chance to expand their Spanish vocabulary with new scientific words and phrases.

Monday’s lesson began as any typical science lesson did: with a hypothesis. Bermudez brought a vat of liquid nitrogen to the classroom and asked students to hypothesize how hot or cold the steaming liquid was.

Many students thought the liquid was hot, and predicted that it would be at least 100 degrees or more. As students raised their hands to make their predictions, it was difficult to tell the difference between native Spanish speakers and native English speakers.

To the students’ surprise, the temperature reading of the liquid nitrogen ended up being minus 200 degrees.

At that point, the fun part of the lesson began. Students broke up into two groups, with David Bermudez leading one group in Spanish, and Lisa Bermudez leading the other in English. The first experiment involved dropping an uncooked hot dog in the liquid nitrogen, with students predicting what would happen to the hot dog.

“Va a romper,” Stephanie Tetz, 6, predicted. “It’s going to break.”

Juana Elias-Medina, 7, predicted it would become like ice. Another student thought it would melt like ice cream.

After a couple more hypotheses, Bermudez placed the hot dog in the vat of liquid nitrogen for a few seconds, then removed it with a pair of tongs. Then he dropped it to the floor, where, to the students’ delight, it shattered all over the classroom like a piece of glass.

Students giggled as they took chunks of the hot dog in their gloved hands and watched steam rise off of the sharp pieces.

Students later put daisies in the liquid nitrogen. After pulling the frozen flowers out of the vat, students hit them on the classroom floor and the flower petals exploded and broke into hundreds of pieces.

To finish out the lesson, other items like inflated balloons and rubber balls were placed in the liquid nitrogen.

“The ball made this loud, giant noise when it hit the ground and cracked,” Zachary Ramirez, 6, said, still smiling long after the experiment finished. “That was really awesome. Wow.”