Floating and sinking

The children in First Class have been learning about floating and sinking. We decided to create our own boats and see how long they would float for. We talked about the materials that would be good to use and did some experimenting in advance… wood is good for floating especially lollipop sticks, pom poms are good for floating as are paper plates but they eventually allow the water to seep through. With this in mind, we set about designing our boats and this is what we came up with:

Some of us decided that the paper plates needed to be ‘waterproofed’ so we covered them with plastic… we used sellotape! Then we put our boats on the water and waited to see what would happen. All of the boats floated. After 4 days, some of the boats began to sink. The boats that used masking tape to secure the parts together ended up loosening and falling apart. The winner was Ciara and Keilah’s boat which stayed floating after 5 days!! Their boat was made of paper plates sealed with sellotape and it included a layer of pom poms in between the paper plates- this added to the buoyancy and trapped some air! Well done girls on your clever design!!