KS2 Science Buoyancy Lesson

I had so much fun with my year 3's doing this practical task and even managed to learn some things myself in the process! The best part was how curious they were and how they extended themselves and even continued on with different experiments after they went home.

Included are my lesson plan and observation sheet to record their findings on.

I used 5 tubs of water and brought in all sorts of different materials to test whether they floated or sank. We talked about buoyancy, displacement and reliability. They loved the accompanying Bill Nye the Science Guy video and we even had time at the end to perform an experiment as a class to make an egg float in salted water (worked maths in here as we measured in ml's starting with the lowest guess and building up). One of the students asked whether dish soap might change the density of the water like the salt did so we grabbed some fairy liquid from the staff room and tried out his theory.

I loved this lesson because it can be very open-ended and you can take it in the direction of your inquiring students rather than strictly sticking to a rigid LO.

The only downside is it does take a while to get everything set up (there went my lunch hour) but it was worth it.