Welcome back! To finish our last term we decided to perform a delicious experiment.

Following our salt and ice experiment, we learned that adding salt to ice can drop its temperature by about 12 degrees within a few minutes. We also learned about melting and freezing points in a previous lesson. We decided to experiment with freezing milk. In our research we found that milk can freeze at just below waters freezing point but it takes about 2 hours. We did not have that kind of time, so using what we had learned about salt and ice, we decided to make a flash freezer to see if we could make INSTANT ICE CREAM!!!

‍

To carry out our experiment we needed a large zippy bag which we filled about half way with ice, then we covered that ice with salt and sealed our bags up tight to hold in the cold. We set them aside to cool. Then in a smaller zippy bag we poured our choice of chocolate, banana, strawberry or chocolate oat milk and zipped it up nice and tight. Very quickly we opened our "freezers" and put our milk bags inside careful to seal them back up so we didn't let the cold out. Then protecting our hands with gloves/ cloth (because our freezers were -12 degrees) we shook and squished the ice around our milk. It took a few minutes and we had one or two ice cream bags pop but finally we were ready to test our theory... could we make our own ice cream with just ice, salt and milk in minutes rather than hours?

‍

YES!! Although some of use had milkshakes or soft serve while others had hard ice cream, we learned that by using our salt and ice trick it was possible to make instant ice cream. We learned that even though something may have a freezing point close to zero, if we drop the temperature further it will speed up the freezing process!

Come back again to see what exciting things are yet to come in 4F!