Forces and Magnets Week 5
Investigating and Explaining Magnets
This final week of the half term I am giving you a range of experiments which you may or may not be able to carry out. If we were in school we would have access to magnets of different types of magnets including horseshoe magnets, magnetic wands, magnetic balls, magnetic rings as well as bar magnets.
One of the investigations we would have done was to use a range of magnets and predict which one we thought was the strongest magnet and then test this by comparing how many paperclips you can pick up. There is a worksheet to show you the parts of the experiment you would need to write and a sheet for you to make a bar chart on. You could adapt this experiment to compare any magnets you have in the house.
The second suggestion is a way for you to make your own compass using a bar magnet. Although many people now use GPS to find out where they are there are still times when it won't work so being able to investigate and work out directions using a compass is still a good skill to have. The magnet always points in a North to South direction.
Finally you could use everything you have learnt about magnets to make a magnetic game.
This final week has several suggestions for you to choose from. I hope you have found investigating forces and magnets fun and have learnt how we use them in every day life too.