Magnet Mania

Hello world. So I realized I’ve been thinking a lot about kindergarten and 1^st grade lessons lately, but what about the older students? Going through NGSS, I feel like the early grades cover science topics that I can have fun with. But here’s a challenge – what about topics that seem too complex to be fun?

To accept this challenge, I went into the 3^rd grade standards and picked out a topic that, to be honest, sounded a bit dry:

3-PS2-3 Motion and Stability: Forces and Interactions

Ask questions to determine cause and effect relationships of electric or magnetic interactions between two objects not in contact with each other.

Asking questions leads to critical thinking, which is good, but how can I make this interesting to the students? I feel like one of the many challenges of being a teacher is to engage students with critical thinking. We can encourage questioning all we want, but if they’re not engaged then our lessons will get nowhere.

Using the internet as my sidekick, I found this really useful teacher blog that not only suggests science lessons that were successful for this teacher, but also includes 10 lessons ideas about magnets that can be used toward the 3^rd grade standard:

http://tabpurvis.blogspot.com/2013/01/magnets-experiments.html

Side note: I spent two years working in a research project studying beginning elementary teachers and what resources they use to plan lessons. While new teachers relied heavily on experienced colleagues for suggestions, there were also internet resources that many of the teachers fell back on: Teacher blogs, Teachers Pay Teachers, and Pinterest (Yes! Pinterest is definitely a fantastic teacher tool!).

Looking at this particular teacher blog, it’s written by a 3^rd grade teacher who has a passion for science class. Here are a few of the magnet lesson ideas that I thought were especially creative:

Making a temporary magnet:

This activity focuses on what actually goes on within a magnet – the alignment of the poles. It requires nails and magnets, enough for students to share or have their own.

First, review with the students how the poles in magnets are lined up. In metals that are not magnets, these poles turn when they get heated or cooled. That is to say, because these poles can move more freely, the metal is not a permanent magnet. So, in order to make a temporary magnet, we would need to turn all of the poles in one direction. The question is, how do we turn the poles? With another magnet!

The teacher should demonstrate the procedure before students do it on their own. Take a nail and pull a magnet down it multiple times. The more strokes you make, the straighter the poles will align. Once you’ve repeated this a few times, place the end of the nail on a few staples and watch them attract! Here’s a bonus – have a competition to see who can pick up the most staples!

Magnet race:

This is a fun game that you can include at the end of a lesson to have students practice working with the concept of repelling and attracting. It requires, for each pair of students, 1 tray and 4 flat magnets.

Color the different sides of the magnets so that students can tell which side is positive and which is negative. Place two magnets on one side of the tray, with opposite sides facing up. The students must use their own magnets to repel their tray magnet to the other edge. If they end up attracting the other partner’s magnet and the two stick together, then both partners must start over. The first magnet to the other edge wins!

Floating magnets:

Again, this activity will help students understand the concept of repelling and attracting. I suggest using this activity during the introduction lesson, possibly as a starter challenge to get students excited and thinking about magnets. Lessons about what it means to attract and repel could follow.

This activity requires circular ceramic magnets (with holes in the middle) as well as a cylindric object such as a pencil.

Challenge students to think about how they could get magnets to float around the pole without touching each other. The trick is to place the magnets on top of each other in such a way that like poles are facing each other. In doing so, the magnets would repel each other and “float” in the air!

These are just a few magnet activities that I thought were clever, and you can check out the blog for the rest! Overall, I think that science lessons need to have a little fun in order to engage students. As I’ve seen in several classrooms, when a phenomenon is just presented to students as direct facts, they lose interest and attention. The key to teaching is to get the students involved, and science class presents the perfect opportunity to do so! If students can think through a challenge without being given the correct answer right away, then they’ll gain critical thinking skills that will help them throughout their entire lives. Plus, who wouldn’t want a little fun in their classroom? I hope these lesson ideas can help you in your future (or current) careers, as always feel free to comment with ideas/suggestions. See ya next time!