Weight, Force, and Motion
Applying force to an object makes it movea concept children employ every day as they push cars or blocks across the floor, draw with a crayon, or pedal a tricycle on the playground. Simple machines such as pulleys, gears, ramps, and levers are endlessly fascinating to children in their efforts to figure out what makes things work, as illustrated by the emergent investigation example in Chapter 6.
Other important ideas are the concepts that moving air is called wind, friction occurs when one object moves over another and produces heat, objects fall down, moving water has force, and machines help people work in different ways. Vocabulary for young children includes pulley, cause/effect, push/pull, force, motion (and names of motions such as roll, glide, fly, bounce), weight, balance, friction, and incline.
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Many materials for learning about this element of physics are easily found in preschool classrooms, such as wood planks in the block area, train track, marbles, wheeled toys, straws, and heavy paper. Other materials can include a balance, pulleys, pendulum, scooters, oscillating fan, rope, plunger or suction cups, clear plastic tubing, and cove molding.
Activities that help children learn about weight, force, and motion include:
- Using blocks and different types of materials to build ramps of different heights/lengths; timing the speed of different kinds of objects rolled down and categorizing/graphing them as fast/slow
- Setting up a clothesline pulley on the playground and using it to move objects
- Going on a ramp hunt throughout a building or neighborhood
- Building a marble maze with tubing
- Setting up an obstacle course for scooter races
- Using magnets to move objects underneath paper
- Tracking shadows over the course of a day on the playground
- Blowing objects across a flat surface with straws
- Tying crepe paper streamers to a fan
- Having a tug of war
- Making paper airplanes and measuring how far they fly
- Applying suction cups to different surfaces
- Placing a cardboard box outside in the sun and drawing different colored chalk lines around its shadow at different hours during the day
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Weight, Force, and Motion