Discoveries Worth their Salt

In his latest quest to promote science in primary schools, Graham Rideal CEO Whitehouse Scientific took 32 ten and eleven year olds from a local school to the Salt Museum, part of the Weaver Hall museum in Northwich, Cheshire.

“The salt museum is an ideal place to introduce students to basic chemical principles such as dissolving, solution, evaporation, crystallisation and filtration,” said Rideal.

In a very exciting day, the children not only looked around the museum and discovered how the process of salt making has evolved from early man into the fully automatic, computer controlled mines of today, but actually made some salt of their own in the laboratory workshop of the museum. Starting with road ‘grit’, which is actually crushed rock salt, mined from caverns directly under the museum, the children applied all the above processes to produce a highly purified table salt for their dinner that evening (but whether their parents had the courage to use it is another matter.) “The highlight of the day,” said Rideal, “was when one young boy said excitedly ‘I never knew science could be so much fun!” To him that was ‘mission accomplished! To reinforce their knowledge, Rideal followed up the visit with a special lesson on salt and presented each child with a video of the day and highly colourful work book.