"I know what happens when you put salt in water?"
"It dissolves!"
"Can I show my friends?"
What Dissolves in Water?
After the above questions were posed an inquiry was born.
The students went through the kitchen cupboards
searching for things they could test. They came up with
salt, oats, corn starch, vanilla, oil, shaving cream and cookie
sprinkles.
"Look, the water turned brown from the vanilla!"
"I'm going to try these things (oats)."
Of course, the children added many things to the water and then
couldn't see what had dissolved and what hadn't. So, they poured the
contents of their cup onto a tray to discover things they thought dissolved
were actually still there.
"The oats really are still there!"
"I guess we just couldn't see them because the cream turned the water white."
"The sprinkles are still there too!"
"The sprinkles are all white now...what happened
to the red and green?"
"Maybe that's why the water looks dirty..."
"The shaving cream makes it look like everything dissolved...but they
didn't all dissolve."
"It's not going away..."
"Look, it's all white from the cream."
"I think everything disappeared!"
Some of the students recorded the results of the experiment...
The oil was a tricky one to decide if it dissolved or not. At first
most of the students said it did not dissolve because they could see it
sitting in bubbles on the water. When they stirred it some children
changed their minds and thought it did dissolve. So...
the next day we had cups of coloured water and trays with oil
spread on them. There were eye droppers in the cups of water. It
didn't take long before they discovered what happened with oil and water.
They loved the pretty balls of colourful water that formed on the trays of oil
"It doesn't really dissolved at all!"
"Look at this one!"
The students discovered all sorts of things about dissolving things in water. It's amazing that this whole inquiry was the idea of one student that caught the interest of so many students in the class!
