Year 3 - Shadows experiment

After finding out last week how shadows are created, this week we were investigating how shadows can get larger or smaller and look for a pattern. Our investigation question was 'Does the distance between the light source and the object affect the size of the shadow?' After discussing what we thought would happen, we carried out an investigation in groups to find out. We had to work as a team to steadily hold a light source at a certain distance from a cardboard circle (the object) and then measure the diameter of the shadow that was created. We did this three times, each time changing the distance at which we held the torch away from the object. We recorded our results in a table. We could see that when we moved the light source away from the object, the shadow became smaller. In our next Science lesson, we will place our results in a line graph to help us to see this pattern and make our final conclusions.