The Blue Dragon
Programme 7: Lots of Stuff!

Aims

This programme aims to develop children's understanding of materials by developing their ideas about classification and the properties of a range of everyday materials.

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Outline

In this programme, the characters are walking through a rainforest when a storm begins and they decide they need to take shelter. They come across a tree house but there are problems getting up to it. The characters find a box of 'stuff' that provides some possible solutions. They sort through the box and classify the items according to properties of materials, such as soft, stretchy, bendy and strong. They use a rope to help them climb up into the tree house, but the roof leaks and the windows have no glass or curtains. They use their box of stuff to solve their problem and take shelter until they are disturbed by a monkey, to whom the tree house belongs.

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Curriculum Relevance

The programme explores:

• classifying different materials according to their properties.
• using different materials to do different things.

There are many curriculum links that can be made, for example:

• Art – wall collage of a rainforest, and animals that live in this habitat.
• English – create a glossary of terms or a dictionary about materials and their different properties.
• Geography – research rainforests and consider similarities and differences to where the children live.

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Background

Materials can be classified according to their properties. For example, metal is hard, cold to touch, shiny and has a ringing tone when struck. Wood on the other hand is warm to touch, hard and opaque, whilst plastic can be hard, soft, flexible or rigid and opaque or transparent. In everyday life many people use the word material to refer to fabric, whereas in science, material refers to many different things, including fabrics. We use different materials to do certain jobs because of their properties.

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Activities

Play a game of 'I SPY' around the classroom, for example:

'I spy with my little eye a metal beginning with …'

At a height on the wall that the children can reach, create a set of headings such as waterproof, strong, flexible, soft and hard, with pieces of Velcro stuck underneath. Place a box labelled 'STUFF' just like the box in the programme. Each material in the box should have a piece of Velcro on the back so that children can sort the materials and fix them in the appropriate place on the Velcro on the wall. If children have been working on 'sets', then hoops could be placed, some overlapping on the display.

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© 4 Ventures 2004