Our Science learning continued this week by exploring how levers work. Levers are a fantastic invention which require a smaller force to be applied to lift or move a load.
We used rulers and pencils to create our own levers and investigated what we needed to do to balance coins of different weights.
Grace made a great observation that the heavier coin needed to be nearer to the fulcrum (ask your child what that is) and the lighter coin should be further away. Once she made this suggestion, lots of us were successful in balancing two different coins.
We moved on to investigate this on a larger scale, finding out how far from the fulcrum different masses (900g, 800g… all the way to 100g) had to be to balance a 1kg mass.
100g had to be 79cm away from the fulcrum but it did balance with 1kg! Amazing.
See whether you can create your own lever at home and whether you can find some levers around the house. We started off our learning by realising just how useful a nut cracker is – it’s a lever you know!