Light & Dark - Refraction

We read the pages about bending light in the Light and Dark book from the KS1 Science series we have. We did the suggested experiments ("floating" coin and putting a spoon in a glass of water) and talked about how the light was being bent so we didn't see the things as they actually were. When I put the spoon handle in the glass, F noticed that it looked bigger than it was - so we talked about how bending the light in a certain way can make things look bigger than they are.

Vocab revision: F remembered that the word for see-through is transparent and M remembered the word for making bigger is magnify. 👍

I wrote refraction in the centre of the whiteboard and asked the girls what it meant: the left two notes were their answers. Then I asked what the effect of it was/what refraction made us see: the bottom two notes.

I asked them if they could think of any uses of refraction then... Using the knowledge on the board so far, why is refraction useful? Can you think of any objects which use refraction, which make things look bigger or smaller than they are? I wrote their examples around the whiteboard as they said them.

We then read about things looking bigger or smaller in the Sight book from the same KS1 Science series, as well as the pages about glasses.

I had the twins look carefully at the lens of their glasses and to feel both those and the lens of the magnifying glass - could they feel they were curved? Compared to the glass in the window, what was the difference? Does a window refract light? Why? Then I added the pink label at the bottom of the whiteboard.

By this time it was time for A's nap, so I gave their task to the twins - to simply explain the difference between reflection and refraction on a piece of paper. Half the paper for each word, write its meaning and draw examples of objects which reflect or refract light.

I wanted them to do this task as I know the two words are similar and easily confused! And this would also consolidate all we had just discussed on refraction by them drawing example objects.

For the reflection side they just drew pictures of anything, since they understand bouncing light as the reason we can see everything. They also drew pictures of mirrors and we talked a little about how we use the word "reflection" in everyday language just to mean when we can see the same image in a surface (such as a mirror, a puddle, or any other shiny surface), but in scientific terms the word is to do with bouncing light. I told them briefly about why we can see our reflections - the shiny surface is smooth and reflects the light back nicely, whereas for everything else the surface is a little bumpy so the light bounces back everywhere - but I could tell this might become confusing and so we didn't pursue it any further!

For the refraction side, they couldn't think of anything which is designed to make objects look smaller... And neither could I! But we have some toy telescopes and binoculars and they noticed that looking through these things the wrong way did the opposite, i.e. made objects look smaller. Why? They came up with because then the lens was curved in the opposite direction! We didn't go into the detail of concave/convex/double lenses. 😁

Finally, they wrote a sentence at the bottom of each side to summarise what they had drawn. We spoke about it first and they both ended up writing the same sentences, although independently. 😂👍