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.

Ask students whether they think there's a way to raise the paper snake off the ground 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 static electricity will move between the tissue paper and the ruler.

Step 2.

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

Find out: Experiment time!

Step 1.

Put a plate on a piece of tissue paper and trace around the plate.

Step 2.

Cut the circle out and draw a spiral inside the circle. Decorate your spiral as a snake, drawing the eyes in the middle of the spiral.

Step 3.

Cut out the spiral.

Step 4.

Rub a plastic ruler hard against a woollen scarf for 30 seconds and immediately touch the head of the snake with the ruler.

Step 5.

Slowly raise your ruler and you should see your snake rise with your ruler and uncoil.

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.

Rubbing the ruler on the wooden scarf caused tiny parts of the atoms in the scarf - the electrons - to collect on the ruler. 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 ruler near the tissue paper, the attraction between it and the positively charged tissue paper is strong enough to actually pull the tissue paper into the air, because it is so light.

Charm a Paper Snake with Static Electricity

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