This half term, Year 5 have been doing all things Science! First, we began by comparing and grouping together everyday materials on the basis of their properties, including their hardness, solubility, transparency, conductivity (electrical and thermal), and response to magnets. This was brilliant and a really 'hands-on' experience, check it out (keep scrolling - there's lots to look at!):

 

In our next lesson, the children gave reasons, based on evidence,  for the particular uses of everyday materials, including metals, wood and plastic. We did this by undertaking a comparative and fair test based on the Scientific enquiry of... 'which material is best at keeping a cup of tea warm?' This enabled us to put our knowledge of conductors and insulators into action.

Well, which material really did keep our cup of tea the warmest!? Have a look here at our experiment in action, along with our findings!

After this, we used our knowledge of the states of matter, solids, liquids and gases, to decide how mixtures might be separated, including through filtering, sieving and evaporating. This was fantastic as we had a competition of 'The Cleanest Water Challenge!'

Finally we learnt that some materials will dissolve in liquid to form a solution, and described how to recover a substance from a solution. All of this helped us to build up to demonstrating that dissolving, mixing and changes of state are reversible changes.