Fun with magnets

We were learning all about magnets last week.

We were talking about the materials that are used to make the things we use every day; chairs, tables, lunch boxes, toys...  We discovered lots of different  materials; wood, plastic and metal.  It was very easy to find the metal things because it is hard, cold, shiny, strong and our magnets would stick to it. 

We also discovered that magnets are fussy things. They will not stick to just anything.  In a magnet north repels north, south repels south, but north and south attract each other. In our experiment that meant that the two blue sides would not stick together no matter how hard we tried and the two red sides would not stick together but the blue and the red attracted each other and stuck together very quickly.  In discovering this we learned that we could push and pull things using magnets or even make our magnets spin around in circles. 

 

 

We know that the north side repels the north side and the south the south of magnets so they will not stick together. We placed the magnets in such a way that they repel each other and in so doing appear to be floating.  We thought this was like MAGIC!!