Force and motion are tough concepts for young learners to grasp, but they are important building blocks for ideas that children will learn later. Using a few fun toys, the youngest of learners can start to develop a sense of what force and motion are and how they interact with them on a daily basis.
One of the easiest ways to show force and motion is to have children blow on a Glimmering Metallic Pinwheels. By changing the strength at which they blow on the pinwheel, students can easily see how fast and slow the pinwheel moves. They can also blow on the pinwheel from different sides and from the front to help the Glimmering Metallic Pinwheels change direction and speed.
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Once we learned the basics of forces and motion and how we can affect them, I introduced the idea of pushes and pulls. I asked my students to tell me what happens whey they are swinging on a swing; sometimes we push and sometimes we pull. I showed them a Magnetic Rainbow Spin Wheels and asked them to watch the wheel as I moved it up and down. We noticed that depending upon how I moved the handle, I was either pushing or pulling the wheel along, helping to exert a force. We also noticed that if I moved the handle quickly or slowly, the wheel would either speed up or slow down. My students each got a Rainbow Spinning Wheel to try on their own.
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Once we had a pretty good idea about force and motion and pushes and pulls, I got out a set of Painted Spin Tops and we tried giving them a push to get them started. My students were easily able to see that by giving the tops a push (and a twist) they could get more than one top spinning at a time!
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Another way to show how we can change the force is to use cars and ramps. By changing the texture of the ramps, my students quickly learned that they could speed their cars up or slow their cars down. First, we used the Learning Resources STEM Force & Motion Activity Set to test out the idea of ramps. On one side of the ramp it is smooth and the other side is bumpy. My students used the cars that came with the set and the blocks to try to speed them up and slow them down.
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Finally, we put everything we had learned about force and motion to use and tried adding different heights to the ramps. This fun STEM Motion & Friction Activity had everything we needed to test out ramps of different heights. My students had races to see whose car would make it to the bottom of the ramp first. They also changed out the textures on the ramp to find out how that slowed down or sped up the motion of their cars. I shared with my students that each time they changed the texture of the ramp out, they were affecting the force.
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