We have so much more work to share since I last posted about our Alchemy Island topic!
After discovering from our co-ordinates that our next stop on the map of Alchemy Island was Dragon Vine Towers we set off on our journey, passing a Fountain of Gold on the way. I challenged the children to create their very own fountains of gold using solid plastic water bottles, gold coloured liquid and the gas from an inflated balloon. See the photos below to see a video of the completed challenge. We then wrote a set of instructions explaining how to create a Fountain of Gold so if you’ve ever wanted to make your very own fountain of gold read the excellent examples of our work below!
Emma and Natasha even attempted to make a never ending Heron Fountain with Miss Salter, it didn’t exactly turn out how they’d expected but they were able to work out where they went wrong and explain what they would do differently next time!
Once we had stopped off at The Fountain of Gold we made our way to Dragon Vine Towers. In our Art lesson we practised our sketching and shading skills using a range of art pencils to complete an image of Dragon Vine Towers. There were some fantastic pieces of art work created.
At Dragon Vine Towers we met the Alchemist who set us the challenge of exploring chemical changes. Our Year 5 children investigated the solubility of a range of ingredients in their Science lesson finding many soluble (dissolvable) ingredients. Try asking your year 5 child which ingredients dissolved and which didn’t.
We all observed the chemical reaction of vinegar and bicarbonate of soda with a different kind of fountain of gold and everybody had a turn at making a plastic polymer from milk and white vinegar by heating up whole milk in a pan until it is steaming but not boiling and adding four teaspoons of white vinegar to a cupful of hot milk. This created a pliable lump of dough which they then moulded into the shape of gold nuggets and after an hour these set to form solid lumps of ‘gold’. We will be using these next week when we hope to find the gold mine and go panning for hidden gold on Alchemy Island!
For all of this incredibly hard work we earn the next set of co-ordinates which we will mark on our Alchemy Island map this week and follow to find the Island’s hidden gold to conclude our topic.
Thank you in particular to Hris Genov who has completed some of the optional home learning work linked to our Alchemy Island Topic which I will share in our next Alchemy Island post. This extra home learning can be found in the Parents Letter I sent out with the Alchemy Island overview and is a great way to join in with our school learning at home together with your child.
