Courtney White
Block 3B
9-24-12
Chemistry Substance Separation Lab
My partner and I were given a mixture of salt, sand, bird seed and iron wire in a cup to
separate by the properties of matter. Magnetism allowed Kris and me to separate the iron wire
with the bar magnet from the rest of the mixture. Due to the amount of space the bird seed
took up, matter; we used the forceps to extract the bird seed from the mixture. When we
added water to the mixture of salt and sand, we used the property of density to separate them.
Because the salt and water are less dense the filter allowed them to pass into the beaker,
however the sand was too dense so it stayed in the filter. Lastly, the salt returned to its original
state by the boiling point of water, which allowed the water to evaporate and leave the salt.
We were able to completely separate the substances from one another. However, two
possible errors could have occurred in this experiment to vary our result from the control of
this experiment. When we separated the iron wire from the mixture in a watch glass, some of
the salt and sand spilled, which could mean we lost some while picking it up. The second error
could have been the filter not allowing some of the salt to pass through and into the beaker. To
fix this error we could have used a beaker instead of the watch glass because then the salt and
sand wouldn’t have spilled. The only change to our procedure would be the amount of water
used to mix the salt and sand. The original amount was 15 milliliters but we changed it to 75
milliliters. Overall I think this was a very successful experiment.