Science - Magnetism

Date: 4th May 2018 @ 2:44pm

Today in Science, Y3 had a challenging question to solve - Are pennies magnetic?

The children came up with some excellent predictions;

• 'I think that only the shiny pennies will stick.' - Bisher
• 'I think that all of the pennies will stick to the magnet.' - Leo
• 'I think that only the clean pennies will be magnetic.' - Kaia

The children then worked in groups to discover if the pennies stuck to the magnets.They quickly found out that only some of the coins were magnetic. Some of the children's ideas why this happened were;

• 'Some of them are really old and they have lost their magnetism.' - Melissa
• 'Some of the darker coloured pennies were too old to stick.' - Ayaan
• 'I think that some of them are made out of different materials because they look different.' - Ameer

As a class, we decided that we should research further why some of the older coins didn't stick. We took a closer look at the pennies and noticed that they had dates on them so decided to record the results of which years were magnetic.

Together we compared our results and found out that the pennies started being magnetic in the year 1992. But why? After having a discussion as to why this could be, we did some research about why this was happened and found out that there are 3 types of magnetic materials - iron, nickel and cobalt - so we knew that the new pennies had to made out of one of those. After some more research, we found out that 1p coins were changed from bronze to copper-plated steel in 1992. How interesting!

We really enjoyed our science experiment and learnt lots about magnets and magnetic materials.