Science Day in Year 5

On Science Day, Year 5 began by exploring and investigating how different objects react in sparkling and still water.  We certainly had a lot of fun discovering the reaction that ‘mentos’ and ‘skittles’ had with the sparkling water!  We also looked at surface tension by being challenged to make a paper-clip float on water when it would normally sink.  Can you work out how we did this?

Thinking back to the first investigation we thought about why some objects float and why some objects sink in water.  This lead to a discussion about ‘density’ and the density of liquids and materials. 

To explore this further, we created a ‘density tower’ with honey, maple syrup, milk, washing up liquid, oil, coloured water and acetone.  We found that different liquids have different density’s which makes them seem to float on top of each other.  We then wanted to know if this has any effect on different objects and where they might sink through water they may float in liquids with different density’s.  The photographs below show our results.