This week in science, we explored the effects of air resistance by designing and testing our own parachutes. After learning how air resistance can slow things down, we discussed how real-life examples like parachutists, birds and planes use this force to their advantage. We then worked in teams to create parachutes of different sizes and shapes to see how they would fall.
Although our parachutes had varying levels of success, we were able to spot a clear trend in our results. We noticed that the bigger the parachute, the slower it fell. This helped us understand that a larger surface area increases air resistance, which means the object takes longer to reach the ground.
Some groups accidentally used different weights, which gave us the perfect opportunity to reflect on the idea of a fair test. We now realise how important it is to only change one thing at a time and to keep the rest of the experiment the same. This experience helped us build our understanding of forces and showed us why careful planning and testing are so important in science.
We are looking forward to developing our investigation skills even further in our next lesson.
Can you explain why a parachute with a larger surface area might fall more slowly than a smaller one?
What a cool experiment! Hope you had lots of fun year 5. Hope you learned lots and lots from this experiment!
I absolutely ADORED it! This was so fun!! My group made the parachute fly for 0.72 seconds. We used the bunny for the experiment. THANKS MISS LEE AND MISS FORSTER ADAMS!!!!!
It was so much fun making these!
this was so fun but some did not hold for long like my group it was less than a second]
That looks so fun
even though bob the penguin fell at o.62 seconds he was OK . we had lots of fun together .
It was fun because we used very light paper so the objects fall down slower!
yes we had amazing fun building them as a group
I really enjoyed our science experiment ! Me and my group used penguin Bob who fell at 0.62s but we still had fun!
I think it was so FUN✨
This was very fun .A very cool experiment to do
It was a great expirement and I had loads of fun!
Even though Bob didnt fly, he still landed kind of safely. It was the best lesson ever thank you Miss Forster Adams and Miss Lee.