Belly flops and dancing raisins

So, it happened!

I delivered my first ever Science Club at a Primary School!

The 1hr, lunch time, slot allocated to the Club was divided into two halves. The first 30 minutes were allocated to 10 pupils in KS2; the second half to 10 pupils in KS1.

With KS2 (yr 3 up to yr6) we looked at 'Why belly flops hurt?', in other words we looked at surface tension.

Together with the pupils we had a bit of fun talking about things we like to do in the water, and whether anyone had ever done a belly flop. We listened to everyone's reports of belly flopping and looked at how to avoid them. Apparently if you do a pencil dive you can avoid them!

To illustrate surface tension I got the children to pour water into plastic plates and re-create their own swimming pool. We then used ground pepper and fairy liquid to see what happens when surface water tension is broken. You can see it working in this youtube video by ELearnin.

Having established that surface tension does exist we then ran a mini-competition to see how many paperclips we could float! At the end of the term we had our winner. 33 floating paperclips!

The kids really enjoyed doing the pepper experiment and by the time we repeated it a couple of times and then had a go at floating paperclips the allocated 30 minutes were gone.

To be continued...