Electricity and Magnetismcreated by Mrs. Kile's 2010 4th graders

Electricity and Magnetism

Electricity:We learned an open circuit is incomplete, and will not work. A closed circuit is complete, and will work. To light the bulb, you have to have a complete circuit. In order to have a complete circuit, you have to have all the wires touching the right place on the battery and the bulb.

Magnets:On each magnet there is a north and south pole. North poles and north poles repel, south poles and south poles repel.South and north poles attract. How do you break the force of magnets? Well, all you have to do is take the magnets apart.

At the presentation we learned about being safe around electricity, what happens when you touch electricity, and how the people work with electricity.

The race was on to see who could light a bulb with only one wire and one battery.

We all had many ideas.

The more batteries you have, the brighter the light is.

In order to light a lightbulb, you need a power source, a path such as a wire, and the bulb. They must all be connected.

Some students testing open and closed circuits. Daniel found out electricity is shocking (in more ways than one).

Ben was drawing open and closed circuits on DoodleBuddy on our iPad.

We learned about parallel circuits and series circuits.

When lighting more than one bulb, parallel circuits keep the lights brighter than a series circuit.

We went around the classroom to see what was a conductor and what was an insulator.

Magnets will stick to iron or steel. They will not stick to plastic, rubber, wood, or glass.

Magnets do not have to come in contact with iron or steel to attract it.

When a magnet's north pole comes intact with another north pole, they repel. They hover if they can't go anywhere.

Here we used a scale to see how many washers it took to break a magnetic field with and without spacers.

We photographed our experiments to remember what we learned.

Learning is fun!

Magnets, electricity, batteries, lights, I hope we do this next year!