Sound
This storyline investigates how sounds are made by waves and how energy influences the volume of a sound that reaches our ears. Students are poised to ask the question, “How might sound carry information from one place to another?”
The storyline begins by having students think about their favorite songs and what they think causes the different sounds in that song. Students focus on vibrations and the different vibrations that different materials make, resulting in different sounds. As students uncover the role of vibrations in sounds, they begin to make more connections with how energy is needed to move molecules that make sounds and that more energy results in a higher volume of the sound.
Using the phenomenon of a speaker, students then begin to model how vibrations can travel through materials as a wave, which carries energy from the initial vibration that can transfer this energy to other objects, like eardrums.
Using a sound wave simulator, students begin to analyze the structure of a model of a wave. They identify the amplitude and wavelength of a wave and see how that relates to different sounds and the volume of the sound.
Now that students understand the structure of a wave and the role that energy plays in making sound, they make connections from physical science to biology by looking at how sounds enter the ear and are transformed into signals that the brain processes as sounds.
The final two lessons focus on applications of sounds and how humans can use technology to not only make sound, but to send signals over long distances that can communicate information via waves. Students complete the storyline by synthesizing ideas from across the storyline to create drawn conceptual models of how waves carry sounds in the form of whispers and screams.
