Welcome back!

Hi, everyone! Welcome to another fabulous year of 4/5 science! I'll be sending home a letter this week with more information about the science program at Emerson, but in the meantime, here's a brief update of what we have been working on. If you have any questions, please email me at caitlinjenkins@berkeley.net. Thanks!

The fourth and fifth graders have been investigating the properties of magnets. We discovered that magnets are attracted to iron and steel, and attract and repel each other based on the orientation of their poles. Today, we measured how the magnetic force between magnets decreases with distance. We'll follow up this activity with graphing to help us with our conclusion and then work on detecting the magnetic field of the earth.
Questions to ask your budding scientist:

• What objects are magnets attracted to?
• How does the orientation of the poles affect the magnets' behavior?
• As the magnets became further apart, how was the magnetic force between them affected? 
• What happened to the magnet when we attached a string to it and hung it from our tables? Why?