Simple Machines - Lever Exploration

Shaun and Anna went to Google and also took a look at some of our Simple Machines topic books to find out more about Levers.  They discovered that there are actually 3 different classes of Levers.
So this week we explored these different classes of levers and figured out how they work to make lifting heavy weights easier for us.

Thanks to Mr Peart's fantastic suggestion, we made a giant lever out of a plank of wood from Mr Kavanagh's shed (there are all sorts of things in there!) and a wooden triangle from the P.E shed.
Then we needed a "load" to lift and Taine kindly volunteered.  We wondered who could lift up Taine by themselves and Danny seemed confident, so we let him have a go.  Unfortunately Danny's muscles failed him and he couldn't lift up Taine very high at all!  So we put Taine on one end of our lever and checked out if Danny could lift him using the lever instead.  What do you know?!  Danny was much stronger using the lever and could lift up Taine quite easily!  Some of us wanted to do a running jump onto the lever to see how high Taine could projectile up in the air - but we might save that for another day when we can make sure the flying person doesn't get hurt.

For the rest of the session, groups had turns using our big lever and changing the position of the fulcrum, load and effort.  The class also found things in the classroom to create their own mini levers with and took photos of them - check them out:

Our discoveries

Levers work by multiplying the effort exerted by the person that is is using the lever.  It seemed that the greater the distance between the effort force and the fulcrum, the heavier a load can be lifted with the same effort force.