Week 5 - What is thermal insulation? 

Many objects that we use are good thermal conductors, (allow heat to pass through them easily), and we use these materials to make useful things like saucepans, radiators and engine parts, where heat needs to be transferred from one place to another easily and quickly. Sometimes however, we want objects to either remain cold or hot. One way we can maintain the temperature of an object is to surround it with a thermal insulating material. This is a material which is not a good conductor of heat and therefore it does not allow very much heat to pass through it. Examples of this are when we keep cold objects in a cool box when going on a picnic, using a wooden spoon to stir heated food to stop us burning our hand and duvets to keep us warm at night.

Please watch this video:

Now we know what thermal insulation means we can see one example of how the materials which make an object are chosen because they have good properties of thermal insulation.

Following on from our work last week about variables we will be doing an experiment similar to the one below in class. If you are at home you can watch this video and write about it for our task. 

Your task: As you did last week, please write up this experiment under the following headings...

What are we trying to find out?

What is our independent variable?

What is our dependent variable?

What are our control variables?

How to do the experiment:

Results: The times each liquid took to go down the slope. Write these in a table please.

Conclusion (What we found out): In sentences explain which liquids were the most and least viscous and use their data to explain how you know this.

If you are home learning, please send me your work  as a photo in  an individual chat in your Teams.

Extension activity:

To find out more about how heat travels through a material, you can watch the clip below.

Click on the picture of the cool bag to watch a video which quickly explains how we use thermal insulators to keep us warm in water.

Homework: Please make a list of 5 objects around the home which are designed to be good thermal insulators and 5 objects which are designed to be good thermal conductors.