This week, we have created Alien Soup (as you do) in order to demonstrate how materials can be separated. We examined what a solution was and discussed irreversible changes learnt in 3/4 (burning, baking, rusting etc). We then began creating our ‘soup’: water, sand, paper clips, salt and rice. The children were challenged with understanding the properties of the objects in order to separate the materials. We used magnetism to remove the paperclips, sieving to retrieve the rice, filtering to remove the sand and evaporation to reveal the dissolved salt. The children then, gleefully, pointed out that we had not reversed everything as we had lost our water which prompted conversations about how we could have used our understanding of condensing to ensure we also had our water in future. (Apologies to Puffins and Doves; I totally forgot to take photos during our session. And, Oscar’s team, I did catch the moment it went slightly wrong.)
