Just like our God, forces and motion are always present. In Year 1/2 we have been wondering why things move, what different forces are around us and how our world works. These sound like giant concepts for a 6–8-year-old to understand, but we have thoroughly dived headfirst into the world of physical science!
We looked into what happens when we push or pull something. Out we went into the playground and used our bodies to experiment how we pushed ourselves down the slides, pulled up on the rock-climbing wall but noticed we also pushed with our feet! We pushed and pulled various items such as rubber bands, playdough, toy cars amongst other things. Students had asked questions such as, “Why do some things roll further than others?” This brought us right into looking at friction! We rolled potatoes down various ramps with different materials on it to see which one would be the fastest. We learnt that friction slowed things down and wouldn’t recommend using fake grass for our potato race track!
Gravity and air resistance was also a big question. Lots of the students knew some things about gravity such as there was no gravity in space, and it’s the reason why we aren’t floating up into space but when I asked what we knew about air resistance, I was met with a bunch of blank and confused faces. To experiment with gravity, we created paper helicopters and thew them off the balcony of the second floor. We investigated whether having more paper clips on them would make them fall faster or slower. We threw an unfolded sheet of paper and a scrunched-up sheet of paper as well to see how gravity would affect them differently. Students drew conclusions such as – the bigger the surface was, the more air resistance there was slowing it down, the heavier that something was, the faster gravity pulled it down.
“Why do some things sink and others float?” “Because it’s heavy, it sinks!” was a common reply until I asked, “Then how does a heavy cruise ship float?” We investigated what items sink and float before we attempted to create an alfoil boat that could carry the most pebbles. We noticed the larger the surface area of our boat, the stronger it was. The boat in our class that actually held the most pebbles was barely folded and was simply a flat sheet of foil with a small edge folded up!
To wrap up all our learning, we planned, designed, and constructed games that used various forces to play. Here are some of our creative designs!
