Virtual Extension
Maybe you missed the program, had to leave early or just want some more Mad Science in between classes...well here you go!
Lights, Colour , Action!
Children enter the world of light and colour. Exciting experiments on white light including colour-wheel blending and prism-splitting spectrums introduce Newton’s colour theory concepts.
FOLLOW -ALONG EXPERIMENTS
Click the link to watch the video
Extension Activities
Try something we didn't do in class
Easy Kaleidoscope
The pretty patterns you see inside your kaleidoscope comes from bouncing lights! The chip bag rectangles act like mirrors. Light bounces off these rectangles. We call this reflection. The mirrors bounce or reflect the light from one to another. We see coloured light because of the coloured beads. Light passes through the beads and then bounces off the mirrors, creating the colourful patterns. The patterns change as the beads move!
Printable Instructions: CLICK HERE
Now Try This:
Try changing the shape of the prism you put inside the kaleidoscope. You can do this by adding more pieces to the original prism or building a new one! Test rectangular or pentagonal prisms. How does changing the shape of the prism affect the patterns inside?
Big Old Science Words
Impress your peeps with your science sounds!
Frequency - How fast a wave (like light) vibrates is its frequency. Red light vibrates 430 000 000 000 000 times a second! (really fast)
Wavelength - The length of one wave. The wavelength of red light is 0.0000007 meters (really small - a human hair is 0.0002m wide!)
Thaumatrope - An optical illusion that was popular when your parents were young 100 years ago. A disk with a picture on each side is attached to a straw. When the straw is twirled between the palms the two pictures appear to blend into one due to the persistence of vision affect.
Kaleidoscope - An optical instrument with two or more reflecting surfaces tilted to each other in an angle, so that one or more (parts of) objects on one end of the mirrors are seen as a regular symmetrical pattern when viewed from the other end, due to repeated reflection.
Chromatography - A lab technique for the separation of a mixture. In our class we used water to separate the different colours of ink from a marker.
Refraction - Light bends as it moves from one substance (or medium) to another, so when light shines from air into water, it bends.
Diffraction - Light bends when it moves through a very small slit or hole. By diffracting white light through a diffraction grating (the eye pieces of our rainbow glasses) we can bend the colours apart so we can see them separately.
Spectroscope - We can learn about objects by studying the colours of light that they produce. A Spectroscope splits apart the colours using refraction or diffraction so that we can see them separately.
Ultraviolet - a colour of light (or frequency of light, or wavelength of light) that is more powerful than violet. Human eyes can't see it, but it can give us sunburns.
Infrared - a colour of light (or frequency of light, or wavelength of light) that is less powerful than red. Human eyes can't see it, but our skin can feel it as heat.
