quick wins – float or sink challenge
Challenge children to predict whether the object will float or sinkin a trough of water using what they find in the garden. Encourage them to explore and examine each object, describing it with STEM words (e.g. heavy, light, soft, bouncy, hollow, hard) before placing it into the water. Use polystyrene packing material or pieces of cork tile to enable children to test what happens when objects that did sink now don’t sink when placed on top of the polystyrene or cork.
Why do some of the objects float and others don’t? Buoyancy is the force that pushes an object upwards when it is in a liquid. Children can feel this force if they try to make a very buoyant object sink – push a bouncy ball or a cork down into the water and feel the resistance. Objects sink or float depending on their weight, shape and density. A ‘dense’ object is heavy and solid for its size, such as a ball bearing, so it sinks. The same amount of metal in a sheet will float because it is less dense and the weight is spread over a larger area.
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