Year 1 children opened their unit of learning all about mass by exploring how pan balances work.  Pupils were excited to collect a range of classroom objects to weigh. Making links to their history learning about Sir Isaac Newton, the children soon made the link between gravitational pulls and could explain that the heavier object has more mass, so the force of gravity on that side is stronger causing the pan to ‘go down’. By the end of the lesson, everybody was using the comparative language ‘heavier than’, ‘lighter than’ and ‘as heavy as’ confidently to describe the mass of different objects.

The next stop in Year 1’s learning journey is to find out whether it is always true that larger objects weigh more.