Autumn 2 Learning
Design and Technology
This half term, the children across Year 5 and 6 designed and made their own Automata toys to give as gifts for Christmas. They first explored various cam shapes and their effect on the mechanism before developing an appropriate design.
Here is a selection of finished products:
Science
In science, children explored reversible and irreversible changes through experimentation. They also designed an investigation about how to separate mixtures, using a range of sieving and filtering techniques.
The children first dissolved salt in lukewarm water to create a solution.
We then boiled the saltwater solution until the water had evaporated, leaving us with the salt! We discussed how we could have collected the water as it evaporated, to complete the cycle...
Building on what we had learned, we looked outside and noticed the snow-covered ground. A member of the class suggested boiling the snow and condensing the water vapour using a glass lid...so we did! This demonstrated melting, evaporating and condensing as examples of reversible change mechanisms.
Some changes are irreversible, and we demonstrated this in our Forest School area using the fire pit to burn some natural materials.
Finally, the children used filtering to separate tea leaves from a mixture and sieving to separate two solids. They also experimented with separating two solids using magnets [retrieving iron filings from sand].