Year 4 - Sound

Introduction

Children learnt about how sounds are made by vibrations and understood that sounds need to travel through a medium, such as a air, in order to reach our ears. They also learnt about how different instruments and even different parts of an instrument can make sounds of different pitches. The children carried out investigations into how the volume of sounds get fainter at different distances and how well sounds can travel through different mediums.

By the end of the unit, they learnt:

• Identify how sounds are made, associating some of them with something vibrating

• Recognise that vibrations from sounds travel through a medium to the ear

• Find patterns between the pitch of a sound and features of the object that produced it

• Find patterns between the volume of a sound and the strength of the vibrations that produced it

• Recognise that sounds get fainter as the distance from the sound source increases

Keywords we used:

Sound, source, vibrate, vibration, travel, pitch, volume, faint, loud, medium, solid, liquid, gas

Home Learning

The children were encouraged to explore our teacher created 'Sound website' that was filled with useful information and videos:

https://sites.google.com/epsch.org/science-sound/home

Pre-Learning

During the weeks leading up to the topic day, we read and explored the story 'Moonbird' by Joyce Dunbar. This is a fantasy story with links to sound as well as deafness and sign language. The story helped us to explore the silence of space as well as how we hear via vibrating air particles that make our ear drums vibrate and this allows a signal to be sent to our brains.

You can listen to the story here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kdMQ9XEMMME

Writing

We conducted an experiment to find out how distance affects the volume of a sound. We made our own prediction, thought about how to make the test fair and used our results to write a conclusion. Read on to see what we discovered!