Resource 5: How can we reduce friction?

Pupil use

Friction is the force that stops your shoes from sliding across the floor. This helps you not to slip over. But sometimes we want to reduce the amount of friction – how can we do this?

Work with your partners to complete this planning sheet for your investigation.

We are trying to find out:

We think that these substances will reduce friction: (give 3–5 ideas)

We predict that the substance that will be best at reducing friction is:

We think this because:

Our investigation:

We will need: (list your equipment)

What we will do:

What we will measure:

What we will change in each experiment:

What we will keep the same:

Our results:

Try to draw a table to record your results.

We found out that the best substance to reduce friction was:

Was your prediction correct?

Did you experience any problems in your investigation? What were they?

Resource 4: Summary of forces for the teacher

Resource 6: More ideas for experiments around forces