We have been very busy this week in 2nd class practicing being young scientists and conducting our sugar cube experiment!
We worked on the Materials strand and investigated Properties and Characteristics of Materials. We wanted to identify and investigate materials that absorb water and those that are waterproof and hopefully we could answer the question: which material will stop the water?
We began by gathering our materials for the experiment. We needed: sugar cubes, containers, water, food colouring, pieces of materials for testing. The materials we chose were: kitchen paper, greaseproof paper and cling film.
Now were were ready to start! We put a small amount of water in the container and added a few drops of food colouring. One question the class wondered was why use food colouring? The food colouring makes it easier to see the water rising. Then we put some sugar cubes into the water. We waited a few minutes and watched what happened; the sugar cubes began to turn green as they absorbed the water. We then added in a new sugar cube, placed a piece of kitchen paper on top of it and added another sugar cube on top of that. We repeated this process with the greaseproof paper and cling film. We watched and waited to see what we would observe.
So, what did we observe? The kitchen paper allowed the water to pass through, the greaseproof paper allowed a tiny bit of water through and the cling film didn’t allow any water through. So the answer to our question is that the cling film stopped the water from being absorbed; it is waterproof. The kitchen paper and greaseproof paper are not waterproof. We recorded our findings in our science copies.
We really enjoyed conducting this experiment and we got to practice the science skills of predicting, investigating and experimenting!
