Within the Grade 2 How We Organize Ourselves unit of inquiry, students are studying about how we use machines to make our life easier.  

Students have studied the 6 basic simple machines – lever, wheel, pulley, screw, wedge, and incline plane.  Now, they are studying how simple machines make our life easier by reducing the effort required to do work.

Today in class, students learned about how friction increases the work required to drag a load across a surface – by using a simple machine (wheels), students learned that less effort was required to pull a load.

Students discovered that without wheels, approximately 1.5 newtons of force was required to pull the load, but that with wheels, the force required was only 0.5 newtons.