Last week, Year 6 were invited to The Cedars, over in Crystal Palace, for a morning of STEM workshops hosted by some of their teachers.
To start the morning, the children had a Chemistry lesson, and they were introduced to the periodic table. Listening to a song, the children noted down some of the elements that they recognised, along with their chemical symbols. For example: Gold = Au, Calcium = Ca, Iron = Fe. After this, the children worked in pairs to investigate different liquids, checking for the presence of any elements by observing how they reacted to a flame. In doing so, the children noticed that some liquids contained different elements, for example, Copper Sulphate and Lithium Iodide, and these caused the flame to change colour. All of a sudden, the invention of fireworks and how we get such bright colours started to make sense!
