Floating and Salty Water

Today we looked at an atlas showing the Dead Sea and thought of some reasons why it might be called the Dead Sea. Then looked at some images and could see people floating in the water reading their newspaper. There was also lots of salt dried up on the beach.

We decided to carry out an investigation to see whether salt helped things to float in the water. First we planned our investigation thinking about what things we needed and how we would carry it out. In order to make the test fair we knew that the only thing we could change was the salt.
Whilst trying to carry out a fair test we came across a few problems particularly with the shape of our plasticine and also some of the salt stayed at the bottom of our container and didn't dissolve into the water.

When we analysed our results we couldn't be sure that the salt made a difference. Next time we would make sure that we had a really good plasticine shape to start with, that wasn't too thin and wouldn't end up leaking. Some of us thought that the salt might dissolve better in hot water, whilst others thought that cold water might be better as the Dead Sea would probably be cold. This is something we may look to investigate next week