The Science topic this term is ‘materials and their properties’, in which children make solutions and mixtures and explore reversible and irreversible changes.

Over the last two days the children have been investigating reversible and irreversible changes.  
We started by mixing different substances, observing and recording what happened.

Each group had vinegar, sparkling water and still water and they had to add bicarbonate of soda, cornflour and icing sugar to each liquid and see what happened.

Then we looked at chemical reactions, or irreversible changes.  The children were challenged to blow up a balloon without using their mouths! They were given vinegar and bicarbonate of soda and were able to complete the challenge! Next we looked at invisible ink, using lime juice and heat! 
 

We started our topic with a recap on previous learning.  Firstly, the children were given a range of different items and were asked to describe them, to identify similarities and differences and to group them.  We then recalled changes in states of matter from ice, to water, to gas, the children were able to identify the processes of melting, freezing and condensation.  This then led us to the water cycle and again the children were encouraged to label the processes using scientific language.

Scientific vocabulary

We continued with our recap of prior learning.  The children were given different scientific vocabulary from previous topics and were asked to mindmap their understanding of each word.