Preschool Science: Learning About Force with Cars & Ramps

Ready for some simple preschool science? This week as part of our Poppins Book Nook, a virtual book club for kids, we decided to take our “To The Laboratory” theme and do some simple preschool science experiments with force and motion.  This is a simple way to introduce physics to preschoolers and all you need is a kid, a ramp, and toy cars!

Preschool Science: Learn Physics with Cars & Ramps

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For this month’s virtual book club we decided on the book Move It!: Motion, Forces and You by Adrienne Mason and then did some experimenting with force on cars to extend our reading. It’s a great book that talks about how we can create motion and force in simple ways! It’s an easy to understand preschool science book and my girls really enjoyed it.

Ready to get learning about force with cars and ramps?

Materials:

• Similar & different size/weight cars (we used matchbox cars and wooden cars)
• Ramps (blocks, cardboard tubes, cardboard packaging, rain gutters…)

We recently got a new washer so I pulled some of the cardboard packaging out to use as ramps and grabbed a few cars from our toy bin.  We then used these to experiment with force, motion, & gravity.  I set the ramp up using a table in our playroom and then girls pushed the cars down with different amounts of force.

At first we only gave them a little push, a small amount of force, to send them down the ramp.  Then we talked about how far they went and what would happen if we added more force when we pushed them? After we guessed what would happen they went back and tried it with a bit more force to test if their predictions were correct.

The girls also tested larger and heavier cars.  They made observations about what the same amount of force on a larger car would result in.  They were excited to discovered that the lightweight cars went farther with a small push. That the heavier cars that needed a bigger push to go the same distance. It took a few tests to understand the concept but soon they were ‘racing’ two cars and correctly predicting which one would go further or how much force they wold need to make one win vs the other one.

With older kids you can use this to introduce different types of force such as gravity, tension, friction, spring and more. For my younger kids this simple preschool science activity was a great way to begin talking about motion and applied force. Plus it’s just so much fun for them!

Share your easy preschool science activities with us below!

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