VC2S2U12

sound can make materials vibrate and vibrating materials can make sound; different actions can be used to produce sounds of varying pitch and volume

• identifying how sounds are made, associating some of them with something vibrating, and then investigating how sound energy makes things vibrate, such as when speaking, using tuning forks, observing vibrations produced by a ‘twanged’ ruler held on a desk, experimenting with different ways of holding or positioning the ruler to produce observably different vibrations and sounds, and observing music speakers
• designing and making instruments that produce different sounds, such as drums, rainsticks, thongophones and box guitars, and using them to build vocabulary such as ‘loudness’ and ‘pitch’ to describe the sounds
• exploring different ways to produce sound using familiar objects, and actions such as striking, blowing, scraping, plucking and shaking
• making earmuffs from a variety of different materials to investigate which provides the best insulation against sound
• finding patterns between the pitch of a sound and features of the object that produced it, or between the volume of a sound and the strength of the vibrations that produced it
• discussing situations where echoes are produced and exploring how some people with vision impairment, and animals such as dolphins and bats, use echolocation to locate objects in their environments