Freely experiment with materials that sink and float in water. Extend to discussion about fish, boats or how air in fur/feathers help animals float.
Free experimentation with the collection of materials, asking students to explore floating and sinking. See the resource for the Play-Debrief-Replay method of teaching free play.
Make a flat piece of foil sink or float. Make a crumpled piece of foil sink or float (air gets trapped in crumpled foil unless it is crumpled under water, or pressed together tightly). Shape a piece of modelling clay so that it floats.
After making boat shapes from foil or modelling clay, add cargo of marbles/coins to see how much it can carry before sinking. In each case ask students to explain what is happening in terms of weight/density/displacement/buoyancy.
After using tin foil to make shapes that can carry cargo, test how many marbles/rocks/seeds they can carry before sinking. Discuss how boats are constructed to carry a lot without sinking. Then add a little flow to the water by moving a finger or stick through it to see if the boat and cargo can still float, and relate to how some boats are designed to carry cargo on rivers or oceans.
Pacific Northwest indigenous canoes are made from Western Red Cedar. The wood is strong, but lightweight. The oils make it buoyant and resistant to rot. Freight canoes travelling over open water are made large with high prows and sterns, so that they can ride the ocean waves without sinking.
Students can try experimenting with their foil boat shape and cargo to see how much water turbulence they can withstand.
Start with a 2x2x2cm piece of styrofoam. Add nails, paper clips and modelling clay to give it neutral buoyancy, so that it floats half way down the water. For this challenge, make sure the water is deeper. If not possible to achieve neutral buoyancy (hard), try and make the assembly sink as slowly as possible. At neutral density the combined density of the materials are the same as water density.
Fish are able to swim at different levels in water - near the surface or deep, so that they can move to find food or hide from predators. Fish hold varying amounts of air in their swim bladder to change what level they are swimming at.
Give students objects with air in them that float (e.g. dry cloth, ping pong balls, styrofoam, popsicle sticks or wood pieces) and objects that sink (e.g. marbles, paperclips, pipe cleaners, wet cloth) to experiment with. Discuss that some objects float because they have air in them. Similarly, animals that live in the water trap air in their fur (e.g. otter) or feathers (e.g. ducks and water birds), to help them float.
Heaviness, lightness, density of an object: Things that sink are “heavier” than things that float, or more specifically, they have a greater “density” (more mass for their volume; more particles packed into the same space). If an object has a greater density than the water it will sink - hence solids tend to sink (unless they have air in them); and gases float.
Weight, buoyancy, displacement: When an object is placed in water, its weight (the force of gravity pulling on its mass) pushes down on the water. The water pushes back up on it, called the force of “buoyancy” (or “upthrust”). The object rests at a level where these forces are balanced. The force of buoyancy equals the weight of the water displaced, so if the object is denser than water, the force of its weight will be greater than the force of buoyancy and it will sink.
Surface tension: forces between the surface molecules that come into play if the object is small enough, and can make things float.