Children are natural scientists because they are curious about the world around them. When 1/2T was thinking about the way different materials and substances are combined, our amazing class came up with: cooking, including cookies, cakes and pizza dough (special mention to our Italian heritage families); fertiliser for the garden (part-time landscapers - we enjoyed the details about how bad this smelt); We remembered that we have recently noticed some nearby roads becoming blacker and smelling strange and thought about how those workers were creating a mixture to cover our roads (gratitude to our engineering families who have built our prior knowledge about this); and one student remembered that her dad mixed chemicals with the water in their pool to keep it clean!!!! (when can we come over for a swim?).
Today's activity called for us to think of a chef, a wizard and a scientist combing different ingredients and to think about what the combinations would look like. For example, puffed rice, cocoa and icing sugar. Cornflour, water and food dye. Oil, water and detergent. As we combined these materials, 1/2T's scientists kept asking, "What if we added this? What if we put these together? Let's combine these things!"
So, as you can see from the pictures, our combinations went the extra mile and we tried to think of accurate words to describe our observations..... liquid, dry, lumpy, runny, separated... The list went on. Can't wait for the next lesson!