Push, Pull and Weight

Overview

Experimenting with balls is fun! In this hands-on lesson, you and your students will make them collide and study how balls can push each-other and people too! While exploring, students will also feel how pushing a light ball is different from pushing a heavier ball. Weight is important.

This lesson fits well together with a lesson where students push balls to discover how people use pushes and pulls to change motion.

NGSS Alignment

This lesson helps students prepare for these Next Generation Science Standards Performance Expectations:

• K-PS2-1. Plan and conduct an investigation to compare the effects of different strengths or different directions of pushes and pulls on the motion of an object.

This lesson focuses on these aspects of NGSS Three Dimensional Learning:

Science & Engineering Practices	Disciplinary Core Ideas	Crosscutting Concepts
Planning and Carrying Out Investigations. With guidance, plan and conduct an investigation in collaboration with peers.	PS2.A: Forces and Motion. Pushes and pulls can have different strengths and directions. Pushing or pulling on an object can change the speed or direction of its motion and can start or stop it. PS2.B: Types of Interactions. When objects touch or collide, they push on one another and can change motion. PS3.C: Relationship Between Energy and Forces. A bigger push or pull makes things speed up or slow down more quickly.	Cause and Effect. Simple tests can be designed to gather evidence to support or refute student ideas about causes.

Materials

For each group:

• Two identical heavier balls, like baseballs (or basket/soccer/volleyballs)
• One light ball that is about the same size as the heavier balls, like a whiffle ball (or a beach ball)

For the entire class:

• Open floor space where students can roll the balls in pairs.
• A few toy-cars of which some or lighter than others.