Magnets, Magenets, Magnets!!!!

Well I have been rather behind in posting what we have been up to lately. :( Sorry about that! A couple of weeks ago we had a science day where we leaned about magnets! Who doesn't want to learn about magnets? They are fun, they stick to stuff and each other, there are a million awesome experiments you can do with them, and you can call it school work! :) Nothing better then that! We started the day off by watching the How Its Made episode about magnets! It was really fun to see all the stuff that they put into magnets to make them and how hot they get (that my friends is a dirty job!). After we finished the movie, it was off to explore! We talked about what things were magnetic, we talked about natural magnetic rocks, we talked about magnet poles, magnetic fields, attraction, and repelling, we even did a bunch of magnetic exploration! Even the littlest ones got a chance to get in on the action! ;) Here are some pictures of what we did!

Watching How Its Made!

Is it magnetic or non magnetic?

North and South Poles

Magnets with different shapes

Magnetic Rocks!

This was an awesome work sheet that demonstrated attraction and repelling of magnets. The child would put the magnet pole together and observe the results. For example, North and North, or South and North, or South and South. This helped them see that opposite poles attract and like pole repel!

Here is the discussion on magnetic fields.

Here we used different magnets and different poles near each other. Then we would sprinkle iron filings on the top of them to observe the different shapes a magnetic field could take.

Opposite poles.

Same poles.

Horse shoe shaped magnet

Square magnet

Circular magnet

Here was a graphing activity for the younger kids.

And lots of free exploration!

This experiment was for the older kids. Here they were looking at the strength of the magnetic force and charting their results using different magnets.

The littlest kiddos had a great time fishing with a magnet for anything that would stick! ;)

It was a great day that I think really taught alot in a short amount of time! plus it was alot of fun! :) I know that I was able to use this day as a jumping off point for our discussion of how a compass works! Happy Schooling Everyone!!!