Science Science Science

This week we began learning how to carry out a science investigations. On Monday Miss Archbold showed us an experiment using milk, food colouring and dishwashing liquid. We put 3 different colours into a bowl of blue milk. Next we added a drop of dish washing liquid. The food colouring showed how the dishwashing liquid races around looking for the fat in the milk. We used this experiement to come up with our own investigations.

This is what we had to do:

1. Ask a question.
Our question was: "What would happen if we used a different liquid?" We decided to try green milk, flavoured milk, soy milk, cream and lemonade. The blue milk was used as our control.

2. Make a prediction.
We all made a prediction about the liquid that our group was going to test.


3. Make it a fair test.
We had to make sure that we kept everything except the liquid the same. We had to use the same amount of liquid, food colouring and dishwashing liquid. We also had to use the same sized container for each test.

4. Measure the results.
We decided to time how long it took for the food colouring to return to the middle of the bowl.
Here are our results:
Blue Milk - 2 mins, 53 secs.
Soy Milk - 3 mins, 35 secs.
Green Milk - Over 7 mins
Flavoured Milk - over 7 mins.
Lemonade - No movement at all.
Cream - No movement at all.

5. Analyse the results.
We decided that the colour moved for longer when there was less fat, because the dishwashing liquid had to hunt for longer before it found enough fat. This meant that the soy milk had a little bit less fat than the blue milk, and the green/flavoured milk had a lot less fat than blue milk. The lemonade had no movement because it has no fat at all. We know that cream has fat so the reason it didn't move was because the cream was too thick.

You could try an investigation of your own at home. You might change the amount of liquid, the size of the container, or the amount of dish washing liquid. Remember to keep the test fair by keeping all of the other ingredients the same.