Mr Toby set us a rather odd challenge this week! He told us that, on his daring voyages around the world, the famous Tudor Explorer Sir Walter Raleigh insisted on drinking piping hot tea! The only problem was, he would never drink his tea right away…apparently he was too busy searching for new land, fighting with Spanish ships or just showing off his fine Tudor clothes! By the time he came to drink his tea, it would be cold!
We worked together to plan a fair test, so that we could compare how well different materials kept the tea hot over time. Read on to learn more about our experiment and to see more photos.
It took a lot of concentration to make sure that we wrapped each container fairly, filled them with the same amount of boiling water and measured the results accurately. You can see from the pictures how carefully we read the thermometers and recorded our results. Some of our discoveries were very surprising! We all expected that the container wrapped in plasticine would be the best insulator of heat. But, to our amazement, the plasticine melted! This meant that all the heat escaped, and the tea cooled down really quickly. Sir Walter Raleigh would not have been pleased with cold tea, served in a gloopy cup!
We are now busy creating graphs so that we can share our results with other people. Come by Flamingo Class to see our science display and find out which material was the best insulator!
Did you know?
That tea was introduced to England by Jesuit priest who had traveled to the Far East and Coffee and chocolate were introduced from the New World. However, coffee, chocolate and tea were only used as medicines during the Tudor era. The Tudors did not usually drink their beverages hot. The Tudors drinks consisted of Ale, Beers and wine. Milk was only drunk by the lower classes.
