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Mass or Weight?!

We have had another amazing week in Year 5! We have started our new companion project about forces and looked at contact and non-contact forces, especially gravity. This has led us to learning about the difference between mass and weight- mass is the amount of subject matter and weight is measured in newtons, determined by the pull of gravity on an object. Interestingly, we also learnt that gravity pulls on all objects at the same rate, therefore objects with different mass fall to the earth at the same time. We just did not believe this so we tried the theory out on two identical bottles, one with water and one without and would you believe it? They landed at the same time! Have a watch of this brilliant video with Brian Cox proving the same theory!

Moving our thinking about weight and mass on even further, we have also used force meters to measure both the mass and the weight of objects around the classroom in both grams and newtons.  We were fascinated when we plotted our results on a graph and saw that weight and mass increase at the same rate, creating a diagonal line across our learning! Have a look at our reciprocal learning in class and our results, we had a lot of fun!

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