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Heating & Cooling
Objectives
- To observe the effects of heat on certain substances.
- To understand that some changes are permanent.
Resources
Ingredients and equipment to bake a cake
Today's Lesson
Main Activity
Explain to your child that today they are going to carry out a scientific experiment and also create something delicious to eat!
Take your child into the kitchen and ask them to collect and weigh the following ingredients:
- 200g sugar
- 200g butter or margarine
- 200g flour
- 2 eggs
- 1 tsp baking powder
- 1 tsp vanilla essence
- Milk- as required
Ask your child to combine all of the ingredients apart from the milk thoroughly - an electric whisk works well to do this if you have one, and then to add sufficient milk to make a soft ‘dropping’ mixture - it should drop from a spoon (or pour like thick lava from a volcano!). Place the mixture into a greased, lined cake tin or smaller, cupcake cases. Then place into a medium-hot oven (180 ⁰C) to bake, until golden and spongy when lightly pressed. Reinforce the scientific vocabulary. For example: Baking is an irreversible process. The mixture was a soft solid, almost liquid baked and now solid. The cake is firm to touch. Once the ingredients are mixed up and baked, there is no going back. We cannot disentangle and separate the various ingredients from each other.
Share your child’s science experiment with family and friends. This is a tasty example of where a permanent change is affected when heat is applied to a combination of materials.