What are forces and what can they do?

We reflected on our learning from Year 1 and 2 about types of materials and their properties.

We also recalled our learning about changing materials with pushes and pulls, twisting, stretching and bending.

We linked this to the word FORCES and pushes and pull.

After testing lots of materials, we decided that metals are the only material that magnets are attracted to.  We decided ‘metals are magnetic.’

Next we tested lots of different metals and discovered that NOT all metals are magnetic.  Strangely, some coins 1 p and 5p coins are magnetic and some 1p and 5p coins are not.

We had super discussions about our scientific discoveries.

We considered the question..How can we make magnetic materials non-magnetic?

We planned an enquiry.

We discovered that wrapping a paperclip in one or two layers of a non- magnetic material did not stop it being attracted by the magnetic.

We thought it might work with more layers.

When we tested, we discovered you needed 8 layers of felt before the magnet could not attract the paperclip.

What can we learn about how 2 magnets react to each other?

We explored what we could do with a number of ring magnets and a post to put them on.  We could make lots of patterns using the characteristics that magnets can attract and repel.

We challenged ourselves to use the knowledge we had learnt to make the patterns shown on the screen.

We worked really hard on drawing scientific diagrams to show what we had done.  We labelled them and added arrow ( to show the forces) to show our learning.