For part of our science curriculum, year five have been investigating reversible and irreversible changes of materials.
The children’s challenge was to separate a mixture of sand, salt, rice and paperclips.
Overall, the experiment was a success, to varying degrees! We found the paper lips easy to remove with a magnet, the rice with a sieve but found that separating the sand and salt was quite difficult even though we had filter paper and water!
Upon evaluation, the children concluded that they would stagger the amount of sand they put in the filter paper to help with separation.
