This half term, we are building on our learning about materials and their properties and pushes and pulls. We will be learning about forces and magnets.

We thought about all the different materials we learnt in year 2 and tried to spot things in the classroom made of them.

We remembered what we learnt in Year 2 about how to change materials - stretching, squashing, bending and twisting.

We made predictions about which materials in the classroom would and would not be attracted to a magnet.  This is what we thought...

Next we tested the different materials in the classroom.  With our safety hats on, we talked about things we should not put the magnets near.  We decided not to touch our watches, the laptops and the interactive whiteboards.

After testing lots of materials, we were interested to discover that most of our predictions were correct.  However, we found that some metals were attracted to the magnet and some were not!  We decided to explore this more...

We tested lots of different types of metal to see what else we could discover.

The results for the 1p and 5p coins were really interesting.  Ask us about this!

This week, we have been working on our enquiry skills.  We used our planning map and discussed as a class what we were going to do.  We were trying to find out which of a selection of materials would be best at stopping a paper clip being attracted to a magnet.

Today we have been exploring what happens when you bring two magnets close together.

When do they attract and when do they repel?

Our enquiry question was...

How far away can the attraction between magnets be felt?

We carried out enquiries to test and compare the forces of attraction and repulsion between 2 magnets.