Science in Year 3 - Fantastic Forces

Date: 4th Feb 2025 @ 12:38pm

Over this half-term, we will be learning about FORCES. To begin with, the children thought about contact forces such as pushes and pulls, twists and turns.  The children have worked together to create a fantastic investigation that saw them using forces to speed up, slow down, stop, spin and change direction of toy cars. 

The used the same toy cars to discover the resistance of surfaces like grass, concrete, wood and carpet.  They recorded their results onto a table and used their computer skills to create different bar graphs to show results clearly.  Their findings would have put Albert Einstein to shame. The children’s conclusions showed a really good understanding of which surfaces show high and low resistance.

The children recalled:

‘Push and pull are contact forces which we use every day.’

‘Resistance is a force that slows and stops an object.’

‘The grass has a high resistance because it is rough and bumpy.’

‘Ice is low resistance so you can skate on it really fast.’

The children have also studied non-contact forces; namely gravity and magnetism.  A non-contact force is invisible and is a force that pushes and pulls on an object without touching it.

Here is what the children remembered.

‘The moon’s gravity is less than Earth because it is smaller.’

‘The larger the planet, the more gravity it has.’

‘Gravity pulls us down so we don’t float into space.’

‘A scientist called Isaac Newton discovered gravity.’

Yesterday, we played with different kinds of magnets and made some amazing discoveries.

‘Magnets have 2 ends called poles.’

‘The magnets say N and S which means North and South.’

‘The sides of N and S attracted together but S an S repelled.’

‘You can make a magnet flip and spin even without touching them together.’

‘The same poles pushed apart from each other. This is a repel.’

‘Opposite poles pull towards each other – this is attract.’

In the next few weeks, we will be continuing to answer questions based on magnetic forces, explaining findings, making predictions and explanations like the amazing scientists we are.