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How The World Works, Grades K-3

Program Description:

It’s the best of our magnetism, light, and electricity programs, specially tailored to the younger set. Easy, hands-on activities include lasers and strobe lights. Students will use prisms, magnifying lenses, magnets, and their own curiosity.

Possible Class Activities:

  • View a demonstration of a laser and a strobe light.
  • Investigate the nature of magnetism by manipulating a pair of powerful ceramic magnets.
  • Suspend a metallic object in the air with magnetism.
  • Compare metallic and non-metallic objects. 
  • Use prisms to study the nature of light, using fluorescent and incandescent light.
  • Study the effect a short-wave ultra-violet light has on students' clothing.
  • Observe a small UV light through a prism.
  • Learn the principle of lateral inhibition through a demonstration.
  • View a Tesla coil demonstration.

Pre-Visit Activities (in your classroom):

  • Make observations of how light is affected by a variety of transparent substances.
  • Ask students what things they think will, and what won’t, be affected by magnets.

Post-Visit Activities:

  • Have students count how many fluorescent bulbs they have at home.
  • Have students count how many incandescent bulbs they have at home.

State of California Science Standards met in this class:

Kindergarten
Physical Sciences

1. Properties of materials can be observed, measured and predicted. As a basis for understanding this concept, students know:

a. objects can be described in terms of the materials they are made of (clay, cloth, paper, etc.) and their physical properties (color, size, shape, weight, texture, flexibility, attraction to magnets, floating and sinking, etc.).

Grade 2
Physical Sciences

f. magnets can be used to make some objects move without being touched.

10000 Skyline Blvd.
Oakland, CA 94619
phone (510) 336-7300
fax (510) 336-7491
www.chabotspace.org

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