Getting Serious about Separating Solids and Liquids

I feel so proud of our third grade science students!  They are working so hard and learning so much about solids, liquids and gases.  I think they are really enjoying this changes unit.  This week we were challenged to incorporate writing and technology into our lessons for the week.  We began our class period with a writing prompt for all our students that they worked on in their science journals.  We asked them to talk about their favorite science activity we have done so far.  While they worked on their writing assignment Debi and I prepared our materials for the class.  My partner Debi did a tremendous job this week organizing all the materials for this lesson and all we had to do was lay them out for the students.  This preparation has proven to be a blessing!  There is a lot less stress and the lessons run much more smooth with good preparation.  This is a lesson I will carry with me in the future for sure.  We began our lesson reexamining predictions the students made at the end of last weeks lesson.  They predicted that the gravel and salt mixture would be the easiest to separate and that the salt and water would be the hardest to separate.  These predictions helped us explain how important predictions are as a science process skill.   After discussing our predictions and reviewing our lesson from last week we were ready to embark on our separating solids and liquids experiment.  The students were using their mixtures from last week to separate back into the original solids and liquids.  The students worked with their materials very well and did a great using a funnel to filter their mixtures.  They separated each mixture and recorded their observations on a record sheet.  They are definitely working better in their groups and starting to communicate their ideas more effectively with their group members.  I am very excited to see this growth in our students in just a months time.  Once their experiment was complete we revisited our big science question of the day, "How can we separate solid and liquid mixtures?"  The students were able to tell us they could use a sieve or a filter to separate mixtures.  We then passed around an information sheet and led a discussion on evaporation to explain to the students how we might be able to separate our salt and water mixture.  Debi passed around mixtures that she had left out for a few days to give students a visual of how heat will cause water to evaporate.  They really seemed to grasp the concept of evaporation with the examples we provided and from our discussion.  We wrapped up our lesson with all of our students sitting on the rug and watching a video/song by "They Might Be Giants"that our professor shared with us.  I thought this was a great way to incorporate technology into this lesson and the kids loved it.  We watched the video once and they begged me to watch it again.  It was nice to use so many different methods of teaching today from lecture, hands on experimentation, discussion, to watching a science video.  Overall I think this lesson went very smoothly and was executed very well.  I am very pleased with how we have improved at classroom management and content teaching over the last five weeks.  I am looking forward to our last two science lessons and I think our students are as well.