Iron in your cereal?
3g Investigate
During one of their first Chemistry lessons on Materials, we discussed what materials were and what we would find in them. Alistair then suggested whether we could find out if there was Iron in our cereal. Keen to use the children’s ideas as a base for an investigation and to enjoy science, 3g set out to investigate whether they could extract Iron from their cereal. “Why does it not crunch on our mouth when we eat it?” “What do we need iron for?” “Which cereal has more iron in it?” were just some of the questions we discussed.
crushing the cereal
In order to complete this investigation, 3g crushed up their cereal – Rice Krispies or Cornflakes – until they had very fine pieces. Placing a magnet inside the beaker and then covering the top of it firmly, they began to shake the beakers violently. After a while, Christian and Alexander checked their magnet – success! Two tiny pieces of Iron were ‘stuck’ on the end of it. With the rest of the form checking their magnets – they all soon found tiny pieces of Iron had ‘come out’ from the cereal and had been attracted to the magnets.
Can you spot the tiny specks of Iron?
(They are right on the end of the magnet)
They also found that the groups who used Rice Krispies, extracted more Iron than the groups who used Cornflakes.
Here are a few photographs of their investigation.
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