Last week Year 4 became quite good at determining whether a substance was a liquid or a solid. They remembered that liquids can be poured and that they tend to take the shape of the container into which they are being poured. Today we’ve been thinking about solids which behave in a similar way to liquids (e.g. salt, flour, sugar and sand). These solids can be poured and do seem to fill up the space in a container.

After closer inspection however, it became clear that sugar, sand, salt and other such substances are actually made up of lots of small solids (grains, crystals etc) and that is how they are able to be poured like a liquid. Here we are investigating:

We used a digital microscope to view some of the substances more closely.

Here is sugar:

And here is salt: