Friday 8th February

To start off our science lesson this week, we learnt three new words: translucent (some of the light passes through it), transparent (almost all of the light passes through it) and opaque (none of the light passes through). We then tested our knowledge of these new terms using an interactive PowerPoint on the interactive whiteboard.

After learning these new words, we started to do some investigating as we tried to find out the answer to the question ‘How do you make shadows bigger and smaller?’ Having spent some time playing around with making some different shadows, each group concluded that to make a shadow bigger you have to move the object closer to the light source and to make a shadow smaller you have to move it further away. The final question we investigated in today’s science lesson was ‘Does the shadow of the object ever get smaller than the object itself?’ This provided some mixed answers from the class because sometimes the object’s shadows looked smaller than the object at different angles. However, when it was explained that the shadow can never be smaller than the object casting the shadow because no less than that amount of light can possibly be blocked out, everyone had to concede that this made sense.