learningtoteachscience

Magnetism – Session 1 December 29, 2011

Session on 20/12/2001

This was the first session on Magnetism for grade 5 students. Duration – 1 hour

Here is what I planned to achieve by the end of the session –

• Vocabulary – Push, pull
• Learning goal – Recognize that a magnet can exert a push or pull
• Activity – Activity 1 – Observe what happens when a magnet is taken near different objects
• Associated skills for the activity – Observation

Here is how the session progressed.

In order to be able to introduce “attract” and “repel”, I had to first use the basic words “push”, “pull”. I was not sure if the students were clear of the difference between push and pull. So, initially I showed them the following images and asked them to recognize what was shown in the image.

When the above image was shown and the question was asked – some shouted push and some shouted pull. That was a clear indication that they did not understand the difference between push and pull.

Then, I called a boy, made him face the class and pushed him. Now, when I asked what I did to the boy, everyone said it was PUSH. If this was clear, I was not sure why they could not get right in the earlier case. When I asked them what was the difference between the 2 cases, they did not come up when any answers.

To make them think, I asked what happened to the boy when I pushed him, they all said that he moved forward. Now, I asked them to think of the picture and say what would happen when to the box. Now, they understood that both were the same action PUSH. Then, the next image was flashed.

With the discussion that happened earlier, they were now able to clearly identify the push in this image. On a second thought, I think this is a little confusion image as one of the zoo-zoos is showing some resistance and pushing backward.

The next image was –

As they were clear of push, this was was easy, they all screamed ‘pulling the rope’.

We then did a recap of push and pull – in the case of push the object moves away from you. In the case of pull, the object moves closer to you (if you are applying the force). Though they knew the word force, I was hesitant in using that in the class.

Then, we moved to the activity part. The class was divided in to groups of 2 – we had 5 groups. I am attaching the activity sheet (intended for the teacher) here. Activity1 – Magnetism

As I did not have all items in the sheet, I managed with these. Each group was given a set of items – Coin, cardboard piece, plastic scale, eraser, pencil, straw, iron nail, small iron balls, tooth pick, magnet.

Also, a worksheet was handed over to every group. Activity1WorkSheet

Once the objects were given o each group, the object names were read out in the class to make sure everyone was aware of what each object was. They had to write if the object experienced a pull when the magnet was brought near it. After all the groups completed, each person in the group had to come forward and demonstrate their observation. As expected, all the groups had the same observation.

Now, we re-iterated that a magnet pulls some objects and does not pull some objects. I pushed the ‘push’ part to the next class as I wanted them to make some more observations about what in the object was causing the pull.

I asked the students to now describe the objects in their own words. They could write if it was solid/liquid/gas, if it was hard/soft, its shape, etc. I am uploading some of the student worksheets here.

Group 1 worksheet

Group 2 worksheet

Group 3 worksheet

Some descriptions are really funny where they say, the eraser is so useful as it helps them to erase whatever wrong they had written 🙂

Once the descriptions were completed, the following probing questions were asked as given in the activity sheet.

Do all solid objects get pulled by the magnet? They said no. They gave examples of the straw, pencil, eraser, scale, cardboard.

Do only big objects get pulled by the magnet? They said no, gave examples of the coin and the small iron ball.

Do all silver coloured objects get pulled by the magnet? They did not have sufficient data from the activity to answer this, but one of the students pointed at the door handle which was silver in color and wanted to check. On checking, they found that it does not get pulled. They then tried taking the magnet closer to the silver border of the window and found that they don’t get pulled. They now saw examples of silver coloured objects that are not pulled by the magnet.

Now, I asked about the scale. They had a plastic scale. The question was – what would happen to a wooden scale and a metal scale if  a magnet was brought near them? They immediately said, that the wooden scale will not get pulled but metal scale will.

If all were scales, why only the metal scale got pulled by the magnet? 

We could not proceed answering this as were running out of time.

At the end of the session, the learning objectives that were achieved – 

1. Difference between push and pull

2. Magnets can pull some objects and does not pull some objects.