Teaching Sequence

Work through this resource material in the following sequence:

20 minutes

Tune in: What will change?

20 minutes

Find out: Experiment time!

20 minutes

Reflection: What did we learn?

Tune in: What will change?

Step 1.

Turn on the tap and turn down the water slowly until you have a VERY thin stream of water.

Step 2.

Ask students whether they think there's a way to change the flow of the water without touching it?

On the off chance students understand some of the basics of static electricity, ask them to try and explain how and why electricity will affect the flow of the water.

Step 3.

Students write their prediction in the first section of the Student Worksheet.

Find out: Experiment time!

Step 1.

Explain to students that you are going to test how forces can be exerted by one object on another without the two objects touching.

Step 2.

Explain steps 1 to ** below to students and have them write their predictions on the Student Worksheet.

Step 3.

Turn on the tap and turn down the water slowly until you have a VERY thin stream of water.

Step 4.

Take the plastic comb and brush it through your hair ten times.

Step 5.

Now slowly bring the comb close to the flowing water, (without actually touching the water). The stream of water should bend towards the comb.

Step 6.

Have students fill out the rest of their Student Worksheets.

Reflection: What did we learn?

Electrostatic forces are non-contact forces; they pull or push on objects without touching them.

Rubbing some materials together can result in something called 'charge' being moved from one surface to the other.

Brushing your hair with the comb caused tiny parts of the atoms in your hair - the electrons - to collect on the comb. These electrons have a negative charge (-).

Things that have a positive charge are attracted to things with a negative charge because they want to give the negatively charged thing protons (+) to even up their balance.

When you bring the negatively charged comb near the water, the attraction between it and the positively charged water is strong enough to actually pull the water towards the comb.

Bend Water with Static Electricity

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