Surface area and floating experiment for primary science.

A free printable worksheet for this really simple science experiment to show how surface area affects floating. Perfect for looking at materials, if you are doing stand alone working scientifically investigations or for something easy to keep up your sleeve when you need to kill 10 minutes!

THE SCIENCE BEHIND THE EXPERIMENT
The science behind the experiment is that as you give your animal bigger feet, you are increasing the surface area that the weight of the animal can be spread over and it can float upright.
When it has tiny feet, all the weight is on that very small area so it is too unstable and falls over.

TURN IT INTO AN INVESTIGATION
There are lots of ways to turn this experiment into an investigation:
Increase the size of the feet by a tiny amount each time, how big do they have to be for the dinosaur to start floating?
Does the shape of the animal affect how big the feet have to be? This is also a great opportunity to think about fair testing. It’s important that the same amount of paper is used even if it’s in a different shape.
Doing the experiment with different materials.
How does the size of the animal affect the size of feet needed?