This week, the children in Year 5 had the opportunity to make some (not so tasty) alien soup as an end to our Science unit. Prior to the lesson, the children had learnt about dissolving substances and evaporation. This week, the children were introduced to the concept of separating mixed materials.
Firstly, we prepared the alien soup by adding gravel, sand, paperclips, salt and water. Once combined, we found out the alien didn’t actually like salt, meaning that we would have to separate the ingredients and start again.
The children used a sieve to carefully separate the gravel and paperclips from the soup as these were the largest ingredients. Then, they used a magnet to remove the paperclips from the gravel and placed each in a different container. Afterwards, the children used filter paper to remove the sand from the soup mixture and were interested in how much sand was trapped in the filter paper despite not being able to see all of it in the soup mixture. Finally, we were left with the salt and water. We discussed what methods we could use to separate the salt and the children identified that we could evaporate the water, leaving the salt to be at the bottom of the container.
