Our new science exploration has our classroom busy with mixtures and solutions. Last week we learned the difference between a mixture and solution and how to separate them. Mixtures could be separated using screens and filters, but solutions required a bit more time. We quickly learned that evaporation was the way to find salt that was in our solution of salt and water. We loved looking closely at the result. We discovered that the salt was now small square crystals that all had little "x"s on them. We learned that salt's scientific name is sodium chloride.
This week we used what we learned about mixtures and solutions and how to separate them with screens, filters, and evaporation. We worked in teams that had to design a way to separate a dry mixture of gravel, salt, and a powder. Each team came up with a unique was to solve the problem. We learned that there can be more than one way to complete this, but some might work a bit better than others!
