Investigating soil

Today we were talking about soil.

Teacher dug up some soil from her garden and brought it into school so we could have a good look at it.
Each table carried out a different investigation with the soil.
One table used magnifying glasses and tweezers to look at what might be in soil.
We found roots, a seed, a stone, and bits of grass.

The next table pushed the soil through the sieve and then used magnifying glasses and tweezers to see what they could find.

They found an ant in addition to stones, roots and grass.

Ms. Cunningham's class, then Ms. O'Connor's class, then Ms. McCaul's class came to see what we found out.  We really enjoyed explaining all our investigations to them.

Our third table mixed water and soil and then let it settle to discover what parts of soil can float (sticks, pieces of wood, grass and tiny pieces of mud) and what sinks (stones, most of the soil and mud).

It was nice mixing soil and water to get dirty water. But how can we make the water clean again?

Our final two tables decided to filter the water, one using a coffee filter and one using stones and cotton wool (we decided not to use sand because we thought that this would make the water dirtier rather than cleaner).

Which do you think would work better?

Here's what we guessed....

Our visiting classes could guess too.

We found out that while neither water ended up clean, the stones and cotton wool worked better than the coffee filters.

Here's some of us explaining our investigations to the other classes:

Soil is SOOO interesting!