Family and Homeschool Activities: Gravity

These family and homeschool activities are designed to complement the Gravity topic on BrainPOP Jr.

Tower of Power

Help your child understand that Earth’s gravity pulls everything downward. Then have him or her look at different skyscrapers online to observe their shapes. How can tall buildings stay up without toppling over? Challenge your child to stack blocks as high as he or she can. You child may want to stack blocks in different ways and experiment with shape and center of gravity. How high can your child stack the blocks until they fall down?

Wind Resistance

Demonstrate to your child how gravity pulls all objects downward. Air pushes against objects in different ways to change the way they fall. Hold up a sheet of paper and a crumpled ball of paper and drop them both at the same time. What happens? Explain to your child that each piece of paper has the same mass, but their shapes cause them to fall in different ways. Experiment with different shapes of paper and compare how they fall. During the experiments, encourage your child to take notes or draw pictures or even record video.