Discovery Day Friday!

  This week as part of our stations we have been making paper helicopters.  We thought about how they worked and what we could do to make them spin faster.

  

Mr Boyd had told Miss Powell about a spinning experiment on a chair, so we tried this out.  We had a turn at spinning on the chair whilst putting out our legs and arms to see what happened.  We discovered that this made us slow down.  Holly said that this was because the air was crashing against us, so it makes us slower.  Then we tried tucking in our arms and legs and found that this helped us to go faster.  Lucas explained that he thought this was because we made ourselves littler, and so we went faster because we were lighter.  Jayden then discussed that he thought that it was because we weren't pushing the air.

We talked about the ideas of pushing and pulling being 'forces' and that on the spinning chair we were pushed around.

Miss Powell then asked if Room 9 could think of anything else that we knew of that we could move or something that spins.  Lucas suggested the swings.  So off we went onto the sunny (but chilly!) playground to see how we can make swings move…

Some of the class could explain that in order to make the swing move, they needed to pull their legs back and then push them forwards.  Chelden showed us how he started; by pushing the swing up as high as it could go behind him, before holding onto the rope and jumping onto the seat.  This made him get higher, quicker.

We experimented with swinging just with our feet tucked in - some of us decided that this made us go faster, and others disagreed.  Next, we had a try at swinging with our legs stretched out - some of use thought that this made us go slower, and others didn't.

When we wanted to slow down there were some people who scuffed their feet so that they made contact with the ground.  Bradley explained that you just need to touch something in order to make yourself slow down and stop. 

Back in the classroom, we talked about other things that people need to use a force on in order to make them move.  

"A wheelbarrow", suggested Ava.  "You need to pull it up, and then you can push it".

"The flying fox," offered Chloe.  "You push and pull on it, to move it".

"You can move the board in our room by pushing or pulling it," Lucas proposed.

"What about a car?" asked Miss Powell.  "Do those move by pushing or pulling?"

    Alex said, "you need to push on some things on the floor."

Bryson added, "you move the wheel."

"Do WE make the car go?" Miss Powell wondered.

 A couple of friends told us that cars had a machine in it, a battery, an engine and you also needed gas to make it move.

This got us thinking about other things that had machines to help them go.  We came up with…motorbikes, tractors, buses, trucks, bikes, robots.  Chelden also added a TV and a light.  Jayden even commented that we were machines.

For the rest of the morning we sketched our ideas about things that you need to use a force on in order to make them work, attempted to make 'helicopters' out of card and tried adding some paper clips to our helicopters to see the affect they had.

A group of boys had a great time experimenting with the helicopters.  Jayden even discovered that you could throw your helicopter, which made it go faster.  What a cool day of discovering!!