Electric Learning

This half term, interest has been ‘sparked’ in Year 6 as they have been learning about Electricity.

They began by looking at different appliances and where electricity comes from. They were able to confidently identify appliances that were powered by mains electricity and those that were powered by batteries. Talking of batteries, did you know that what we all know as a battery is actually known as a cell? A battery can only be called a battery if it consists of more than one cell. Car batteries are a great example of this as they are a collection of many cells joined together.

Over the last two Science sessions, children were tasked with finding out if the length of wire in a circuit had an effect on the components in it. They began by making some predictions. Alexander thought that the components would go “crazy” whereas Alicia thought that the longer the wire, the less electricity would be able to flow through it.

They were then tasked with writing up their investigations before carrying out the practical part (the best part). Children worked really hard to make sure that their investigations could be carried out by anyone just by reading their instructions. Finally, it was time for the main event - making circuits! Each group managed to create a control circuit to compare longer circuits against. They repeated each experiment with different components to see what effect the different length of wire had on them.

Click on the images below to read of some of their write ups.

In conclusion, children found that there was a small effect on the components in the circuit depending on the length of wire used. We are yet to find out why there was an effect or what the effect is called - perhaps we will find out in our next Science session.