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