Science – Light

This term in science, the children are learning all about light and shadows.  We started our learning understanding what is meant by darkness.  We hid objects inside a box and gradually illuminated them until we could recognise what the object was.  The children understood that darkness is the absence of light.

Using our class set of cameras, the children went on a shadow search around the school. We were lucky that we had a bright sunny day to do this! We found shadows both inside and outside. Before we set off on their search, we learnt how light travels in straight lines and this is why shadows are formed.

We also investigated why shadows are sometimes large and other times small for the same object. We learnt that the closer the object is to the light source, the larger the shadow. We used a torch, a metre rule, a puppet (Varjak Paw themed!) and some white paper to record our results. We started with the puppet 100cm away from the light source then gradually moved the puppet 10cm closer to the light source,  each time marking the top of the shadow on the paper until we were just 20cm away from the light source. Then we measured the height of the shadow at each point, recording our results on a table. We finished our investigation by plotting our results on a bar chart to see if we could see a pattern.