Experimenting with Force

 This week we put a lot of force into discovering forces through many hands-on activities and experiments. 

In PE, we had several epic Tug-of-War battles! The girls proved to be much stronger than the boys and I imagined and even beat us with me helping the boys (just wait until my sore back is feeling better then we’ll have a rematch!)

We also explored pushing and pulling forces using roller boards to race around the playground and playing roller board tag. Hopefully the students decide to follow instructions better next week as we lost a lot of time on Wednesday and couldn’t complete the final race.

In class, we also conducted several experiments. We experimented with push and pull when we created Hopper Poppers with cardboard and rubber bands to see how high they would jump. The students then modified the designs to see if they could get them to jump higher.

We also built models of a tiny town and a giant boulder, and played a game with a partner to try to redirect the boulder so that it wouldn’t flatten Tiny Town! It was a lot of fun, experimenting to see what worked and what didn’t work.

And in math, we moved on from symmetry and patterning and back to adding and subtracting but with finding the complements to 10 and 100. To practice, we played a game with a partner where the first player shows a number between 0-10 on their fingers and then player two has to show the number that will complement the first player’s number and combine to make 10. To add a challenge, when player one shows the front of their hand, player two must respond by showing the complement but by showing the back of their hand! 

Let’s have more fun experimenting with force again next week.