Find resources / Activities / Floating and sinking – Te tere me te totohu Activity

So that tamariki can:

• enjoy a play and learning activity indoors or outside
• have an opportunity to predict and test ideas
• experience the fun and soothing effects of water play
• strengthen expressive language by building their vocabulary of terms related to floating, sinking and water play.

• Make sure the situation is safe for your tamaiti. Water play needs close supervision at all times.
• You’ll need some water in a container — for example, a bath, basin, bowl, bucket, puddle or rock pool.
• You’ll need things to test — ask your tamaiti to help collect some nearby things that are okay to get wet.
• Items from home could be a wooden block, a plastic lid, a peg, a cork, a sock, a metal spoon, a flower or some leaves.
• At the beach you could collect small stones, shells, sticks, feathers, pumice, some seaweed or leaves.
• Have them hold each thing one at a time and ask them what they think will happen when they put it into the water.
• Ask them, ‘Why do you think that happened?’
• Try all the things you collected to see what floats and what sinks — you could help them to group the items.
• If your tamaiti is still interested, you can think and talk about what the things that float or sink have in common with each other.
• If you’re playing in a bucket, bowl or a bath, explore what happens to the water level when something big sinks to the bottom. If you can make a mark on the bucket before and after, you can measure the difference the sinking object makes to the water level. This is called ‘water displacement’.
• In the bath, notice what happens to the water level when someone gets in (and out) of the water.
• Share picture books such as, Who Sank the Boat?, Mr Archimedes’ Bath and Alexander’s Outing, all by Pamela Allen.