Attracted to Learning

The amazing, magical power of magnetism. 
What wonderful discoveries will we uncover?

The month of September Unit was Magnets.
When I asked my kids this year what they wanted to study, both of them agreed that magnetism was fascinating to them. My son is constantly interested in anything having to do with science and experiments. This sounded like a good plan.

I went to the school supply store and purchased a kit. It is small but has everything needed to conduct proper experiments about magnetism. Even daily instructions for one different kind of experiment per day for about a week. Then I went to the library and found all the books I could about the way magnets work. Then I started planning,


The kids love to do art projects, so I thought that we should start by having something to work with. I recycled several tin cans (tin has some iron which is magnetic, aluminum is not magnetic.) and a few bottle-caps. Then I got some magnetic tape that has a adhesive side, and some good titanium craft scissors. (Titanium is non-magnetic as well.) The kids first project was to make a decoration for the outside of the cans to make them into pencil-holders. It will be really hard for them, when it is time for writing, to use not being able to find a pencil as an excuse, now.
We then made bottlecap magnets from cutting tiny pictures out of magazines and mod-podge-ing them into the bottle caps, and adhering small pieces of the magnetic tape to the backs. These stuck onto the pencil holders for a bit more personality. It was fun searching through the magazines for the little pictures and using the tiny bottle cap frames.

But the real artwork came when we took a new spin on a favorite medium. My kids have loved to make marble-paintings. We get a flat, rectangular bin and put paper inside then we dip marbles into the paint and roll them around the paper by tilting the bin side to side or putting the lid on and shaking the jibblies out of it. Lots of fun and a really interesting result, especially considering how many colors and combinations of colors of paint.
Also how long you roll the marbles around can change the look. But this time, we added the science of magnetism to it.
We used the magnetic marbles from the kit. And a powerful wand magnet.

I first set it up by asking the kids to hypothesize whether the magnets would still be attracted to the wand through the plastic bin, or if they would not react to the wands movements through the bin. It was a split guess. We had to test it out and find out! (I tested it myself ahead of time, to make sure this project would turn out as fun as I had hoped.)

I put each kids' name on the back of the paper, so that when the whole paper was full of paint I would still be able to tell later on whose was whose. Then we took turns. That day I had an extra preschool student, so we got to try 3 different ways of moving the marbles.
The first way was to put all the marbles in together. Now, since each marble is also magnet, as well as being attracted by the wand, they were all attracted to each other. So eventually we had a connected line of marbles that wanted to move as one. That blended the different colors of paint much more than the usual effect of regular marble painting.

I had one kid hold the bin while the other kid moved the wand underneath the bin and paper. They never had to touch the wand to the bin, and the marbles would move whichever way the wand went. I thought  it would be better to leave the lid off, since it was a solid colored opaque lid, so they could see what they were doing, and because it was open, I had them leave the wand under, so the marbles wouldn't stick to the wand. It was really fun to watch them move the marbles around like magic, having the wand so far away and still being so effective. But having all the marbles in the bin was slightly challenging, so the next kid chose to do one color at a time.

This gave her a little more control over how the color was being applied to the artwork.
It was a little longer of a process, but more enjoyable to my little artist that way. :)

The third kid was excited about moving the marbles as fast as he could, so the result if his artwork was quite a bit different than the other two. It is so cool having the kids try things and experiment and blend science and art together.

The kids really enjoyed exploring and experimenting different movements and watching how the marbles would react. For instance, they found that by flipping the wand over top and bottom with a little flick of the wrist, the marble would dance, due to the repelling one side and being attracted to the other. And by adding all the colors at once, they could make all the marbles do all kids of movements, all resulting in much different-looking pictures:

The whole project felt like a very fun, hands-on way to learn the function of attracting and repelling.
There were other fun projects we explored, of which I have no pictures, sadly. So here is a picture of a magnet:

But the book I used for some of them was a book of illusions that make things appear to be floating or moving on their own, such as making a donut-ring magnet levitate above the table on a pencil, or causing a paper "snake" to rise out of a basket like a snake charmer, using hidden magnets to propel the illusion. These were a light-hearted way of finding new uses for magnetism. I would teach them the principle of the trick, then they would preform it for daddy later. This was something to which they seemed to really look forward.
They had the "boring part of the lesson, which was us discussing the properties of magnets and their uses, and then we would do a hands on part.
We learned about the history of magnetic discovery, and about compasses, electromagnetism, and its connections to modern-day electronic devices, and many other topics. They had fun seeing a small bar magnet floating on a piece of foam in a bowl of water point the way north. And watching iron filings surround different shaped magnets through the plastic covering, then making the "Wooly Willy" facial hair designs with it.

All in all, the month of September was a fun lesson unit. What will October bring us? Stay tuned to find out. :)