Year 3 study Forces

This week in Science, Year 3 started a new and exciting topic: Forces! The children were very excited to discuss their prior knowledge on the topic, sharing facts such as, “We have different names for forces like gravity and friction”. After playing with a number of objects and thinking about what was causing them to move, the children were able to define exactly what a force is.

The children had a very clear idea of what they wanted to find out over the course of the half term, which will influence the tasks in science lessons over the next few week. Some of the fantastic lines of enquiry offered by the children were “Is gravity a push or a pull force?”, “Would pushing an object have the same effect on different planets?”, “Why do some things float whilst others sink?” 

The children then designed and conducted a test to discover how different surface materials affect movement. The children wanted to let a car toy roll down a ramp, each time covered in a different surface material. After deciding which materials they would like to test, the children carefully considered what would make it a fair test. They knew that the ramp should be kept at the same height, the same car should be used each time and should have the same amount of force placed on it, and the method of measuring should also stay the same.