How much water can we soak up?

We have been talking about different materials and their properties.

We have talked about waterproof and absorbent materials.

Today we decided to see just how absorbent some materials are.

The materials we had in class were plastic, a page from a magazine, kitchen towel, tissue and newspaper.

To begin we had a guess as to which material would be most absorbent (or best for soaking up water).

Here is what we guessed...most of us thought the kitchen towel would be best, and no one at all thought that the magazine would be good for soaking up spills.

We wanted our experiment to be fair, so we poured exactly the same amount of coloured water (10ml) into 5 small glasses.  We also got teacher to cut the materials into EXACTLY the same size squares so it would be a fair test.

Next we decided that the best way to test how much water got absorbed was to try soaking it up and then pouring the left over water back into the container to see how much water didn't get absorbed.

This took a steady hand!

Here we are trying the kitchen towel,

the magazine,

the plastic,

the newspaper,

and finally the tissue.

Now we compared how much water was left over (not absorbed) after using different materials to soak up the water.

We arranged the materials in order from the most absorbent (soaked up most) to the most water proof (soaked up least).  Here are our results:

Kitchen towel was most absorbent (1ml left over), then tissue (2ml), newspaper (3ml), magazine (8ml) and last of all was plastic (9ml....it only soaked up 1ml!).

We wrote up the amounts of water left over after the soaking.

Now we know which materials are best to use whent mopping up spills.

We learned lots about waterproof and absorbent materials today.