This week, Newton’s Laws of Motion provided us with a nearly-last-minute 4-H Demonstration. We chose some of the simplest experiments to explore the Laws of Motion…
Newton’s First Law of Motion
Garfield learned that he really should buckle his seat belt, for an object in motion will continue moving at the same speed until an outside force acts upon it. (I’m afraid Odie won this round because… he wore his seat belt!)
Newton’s Second Law of Motion
Other activities:
- Play around with the variables in this law by keeping mass constant and changing “acceleration” (throw the same marble in at different “accelerations.”)
- Think about what happens to acceleration if you apply a greater force to an object, as a baseball player might throw a baseball. (Applying a greater force to the same baseball would increase the acceleration.)
- If we instead increase the mass of the baseball keeping the force constant, the ball would not accelerate to as great a velocity.
Note: We ended up with a flour-y powdery mess everywhere after doing this twenty or thirty times. Who needs expensive toys when you have permission to throw marbles into flour over and over again? (Reminds me of the time Levi busted a bag of coconut flour in the family room and spread it out with his dump trucks to create a sandbox on our carpet. Our vacuum cleaner still smells like coconut.)
Newton’s Third Law of Motion
We attached a balloon “rocket” to a string. It would have been lovely to paste a picture of a rocket on top of the straw, but… we didn’t.
(There are other forces acting on the above set-up, but for simplicity, I have only listed the exhaust action and the straw rocket reaction.)
The direct links to the posters on our tri-fold board from the Swift Mission Educator Resources website: