Separating a Mixture: Iron, sand and salt

Students are introduced to the "horrific", yet incredibly improbable event of three lorries each containing sand, iron fillings and salt colliding. Their loads have been perfectly mixed and need separating...

Students will work in groups to decide on how they might use their allocated equipment to separate these substances. Using content from the "ocean-clean up lesson", and "sieving for gold" lesson students will extract the iron fillings with magnets, use filtration to remove the sand filtrate and evaporation to remove the salt from the water.