Year 6 Take a Light Approach to Prisms

Continuing with our Light unit, Year 6 took up the challenge of a very technical physics practical this week and drew ray diagrams showing refraction (bending) of light as it entered and left a glass block.

After drawing around the ray box and the glass block, they shone the light ray so that it entered the glass along its longest side and emerged the other side. To trace the path of light, pupils put crosses over the ray and then joined these up in pencil. It was only then that we could see just how much the light had been bent inside the glass, because although the entering (incident) ray and exiting (emergent) ray were parallel, they had defiantly deviated from a straight line.

We measured the angels of incidence, refraction, emergence and normal with protractors and added directional arrows to complete the diagrams to Physics GCSE level!

We also had fun with prisms where we looked through them to split white light into the colours of the rainbow and shone torches through them to find the angle at which light was dispersed. Mrs Hills-Matthews demonstrated how to do this and it was really funny to see how the light had been refracted to show her eyes on her forehead!

We used all this practical experience to answer exam style questions and then checked and upleveled our work using Riley Bot to great success. 

All of Year 6 performed these technical practicals to an incredibly high standard and they should be very proud of their results.