How can sound make something move?
This physical science unit builds science ideas about how sound is produced and how it interacts with materials.
If you’ve hovered a hand over a speaker you can feel sound. Sometimes, with a big enough & loud enough speaker, your body feels sound even from across a room. Students watch a video about a similar experience. But instead of feeling the sound, students see the sound shaking a set of windows back and forth across a parking lot. This motivates students to ask questions about sound and the windows and start to develop a model to explain how and why the windows were shaking.
As the unit progresses, students examine patterns of different cause and effect relationships about sound. These patterns help students to better characterize sound (loudness, pitch, etc.) in order to develop their models of sound. Students refine these models through class discussions and arguments while deepening their explanations of how sound travels from the car to the windows. Using computer simulations and conducting investigations, students gather evidence and refine their models to best explain the shaking windows event.