We ended our physical science unit with simple machines. There were so many things we could have done with this unit, but with the lack of time we had to choose one activity. We chose to do a lever lab! It was a very simple lab, but covered the important concepts of levers.
We first gave the students a stack of 5 pennies (taped together), a ruler, and they could use a pen or pencil. They used this to construct a lever.
The objective of the lab was so that students will understand the relationship between effort force, resistance fore, and the location of the fulcrum. In this lab, the pennies represented the resistance force, the student's finger representing the effort force, and the pen represented the fulcrum.
Students would follow these steps:
1. Construct a
lever using the ruler as the straight bar and the pen as the fulcrum.
2. Place the
pen beneath the ruler at the 6 inch mark. Place the stack of pennies over the 1
inch mark.
3. Push down
on the 12 inch mark on the ruler. When you push on the ruler, you are exerting
an effort force.
4. Move the
fulcrum to the 8 inch mark and repeat step 4.
5. Move the
pen back to the 4 inch mark and repeat step 4.
And then, we students were to answer these questions before discussion:
Conclusions:
1) How did your effort force
differ between the three trials?
2) Explain how increasing and
decreasing the distance between the effort force and the fulcrum affected the effort
force. What type of lever is this?
3) How does this relate to
where you push on a door when opening it?
Also, I will be throwing a SUPER BOWL SALE on my TpT websites as well as my TN site.
My Teachers Pay Teachers sale will run from 2/2-2/3 and will be 20% off!!!
My Teachers Notebook sale starts today 2/1 - 2/3 and will be my 20% off plus an additional percent off from teacher's notebook!
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