Year 5 investigating materials and their properties

INVESTIGATING MATERIALS AND THEIR PROPERTIES

Year 5 are investigating materials and their properties this term. They have tested different materials and classified them by their properties. Continuing their investigations, they found out what happens to a solid when it dissolves. This allowed them to refine their skills around creating a fair test with particular focus on  independent, dependent and control variables. Working collaboratively, they carried out experiments to answer their learning question: What happens when materials dissolve? This will lead us into finding out whether a dissolved solid can be recovered from a solution.

The key objectives in this unit of learning are to:

• compare and group materials based on their properties (e.g. hardness, solubility, transparency, conductivity, [electrical & thermal], and response to magnets
• test materials based on their properties. Pupils will
  give evidenced reasons why materials should be used for specific purposes.
• describe how a material dissolves to form a solution; explaining the process of dissolving.
• describe and show how to recover a substance from a solution.
• describe how some materials can be separated. Pupils will
  demonstrate how materials can be separated (e.g. through filtering, sieving and evaporating).
• know and can demonstrate that some changes are reversible and some are not. Pupils will discuss reversible and irreversible changes and explain how some changes result in the formation of a new material and that this is usually irreversible.