Mrs. Logue’s 5th grade students made mixtures and then practiced using different tools to separate them by their properties.
First, they combined gravel and sand and then separated it by particle size using a sieve.
Then, students mixed iron filings into the sand and discussed how to separate them. They decided on using a magnet to get the iron out of the sand.
Finally, they mixed salt into the sand and discovered that the only way to separate the salt out was with the property of solubility. Students poured water into the mixture and stirred to dissolve the salt. Then they poured the saltwater mixture through a filter to remove any sand.
Once the sand was out they needed to figure out how to get the salt out of the water. They learned that if they boiled the saltwater then the water would change to water vapor and the salt particles would be left behind, thus separating the salt from the mixture.
Standard: Demonstrate and explain that mixtures of solids can be separated based on observable properties of their parts such as particle size, shape, color, and magnetic attraction.
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