What’s it for?     We can do things with materials to find out how they act and change.

The Beehive opened at the beginning of Term 3 and this has been our first Inquiry. We have been focusing on working cooperatively and being good ‘Communicators’ and there have been lots of new skills for us to learn alongside our Inquiry.

Materials are things that you can use to build, make or create. There are lots of different materials like plastic, metal, wood, wool, fabric …! Materials can have different textures like rough, smooth, spongy, gritty … You use different materials for different reasons. There are so many different ways that you can change materials. We experimented with cooling, freezing, heating, melting, boiling, bending, twisting, squashing …! We did lots of different experiments. We made predictions about what we thought would happen. Sometimes we were right and sometimes we were wrong but we always learnt something new!

Some highlights have been …

Our experiments trying to change chocolate! We grated, pressed, chopped, hammered, put it in the sun, soaked it in hot and cold water … our favourite method was sucking the chocolate which melted it! After our experiments we melted some blocks of chocolate over hot water and in the microwave. We poured the chocolate into moulds then set the chocolates in the fridge. We made our own chocolates and we saw chocolate turn from a solid to a liquid and back to a solid, using heating and cooling.