Sound and Writing

I have created a unit of work that combines literacy (procedural writing) and science (investigations into sound). I felt that learning to write instructions would be more authentic if students actually devised the tasks themselves!

To hook the students into the investigation of sound I did a simple demonstration where we covered a bowl with gladwrap and poured some pepper on the gladwrap. Students then banged an oven tray with a wooden spoon around 5-10cm from the bowl. The pepper jumped! We wondered how this happened?

Students then created string telephones using tin cans, paper cups and simliar objects. They experimented by twanging the string with different intensities, changing the length of the string and the tension on the string. Some students joined a number of string telephones together to make a 'conference call'!

Students conducted other investigations into sound such as: making instuments out of a drinking straw; twanging a ruler on the edge of a desk; holding a baloon near a stereo speaker and twirling a ruler tied to a piece of string. For each experiment students wrote up a set of instructions so that a reader could follow their procedure.

Following our investigations, students created two big ideas to summarise our findings:

  

 

We also created instructions to guide us in our procedural writing: