chemistry | mcps

This week we had our STEM open afternoon and P7/6 enjoyed showing friends and family a few of the experiments that we have been doing in class. All of our experiments have their own unique qualities but they were all chemical reactions. This week we made more slime, more elephant toothpaste (our water was the correct temperature), blobs in a bottle and a fizz inflator. When we made our we mixed together glue and washing detergent, we had to be careful though because if we mixed too much detergent with the glue, the mixture became too gloopy and lumpy and wasn’t the correct consistency for slime, we seem to have now perfected our slime and it really is now taking over P7/6!!!! Blobs in a bottle and the fizz inflator were new experiments, so were excited to find out what the results would be. Blobs in the bottle was a bit like a lamp lamp and The Fizz Inflator was a bit like a balloon pump. With our Blobs in a Bottle experiment we mixed together sunflower oil, and water but they did not mix together and the oil sat on top of the water, we then added some food colouring and this mixed with the water, once we had all the materials in the bottle we added an alka seltzer. The results were amazing…..the alka seltzer fizzed and pushed the water up into the sunflower oil and made blobs, it was really amazing. The Fizz Inflator consisted of bicarbonate of soda, vinegar, a balloon and a bottle. We had to put the vinegar in the bottle and then carefully put some bicarbonate of soda into the balloon. Once we had all the materials in place we had to very carefully try and put the balloon on top of the bottle, this allowed the bicarbonate of soda to fall into the vinegar, the two chemicals worked together to create an acid base reaction and the two chemicals work together to create carbon dioxide and this blew up the balloon, it really was exciting to watch. I think all of the family and friends were impressed by our experiments. Hopefully they might be able to try this at home!!!

I hope you all have a good weekend.

Miss Anderson and P7/6

LI: We are learning to identify the features of a fair test

LI: We are learning to classify materials

SC: I can identify that a material/substance has changed through decay, cooking, burning, rusting, melting and dissolving.

I can investigate what causes this change.

This week we kicked off our new topic ‘Cool Chemistry’ and we have been very busy discovery what chemistry is and what processes we have to go through when conducting an experiment.We are all excited that we are going to be learning about chemistry and what this involves. At the beginning of the week we looked how materials can changed through different processes. We were all given a small piece of clay which we examined and we had to describe its properties. Some of the words that we came up with were: flexible, moist, dusty, strong smell, squishy, gritty and soft. We then watched a film to see what happens to clay when it gets fired in a kiln. Once the clay had gone through the heating process the properties of it were very different. Some of the words that we used to describe the properties of the fired clay were: smooth, hard, fragile, rigid, breakable. We discussed how clay would not be able to go back to its original form and came up with other materials that this would happen to when they have gone through a change, we discussed that bread and eggs could not go back to their original form.

We also learned about fair testing, what this involves and why it is necessary. Once we had learned about fair testing we then conducted our own investigation into what melts faster, butter or chocolate. We discussed how we could make this a fair test and decided that we had to keep the water at the same temperature when melting the butter and chocolate, the water had to be the same amount and the butter and chocolate had to be the same amount otherwise this would not be fair and our results might vary. We made predictions and were surprised at some of the results. We are looking forward to learning more about chemistry over the coming weeks.

Keep your eyes peeled for more experiments.

Miss Anderson

STEM P7/6

Cool Chemistry in P7/6