Recently in the Middles we have been looking into the science of things that spin - we came away giddy with facts.

Our first investigation was to study a globe with Cam and talk about how night and day happens. Guess what? Our Earth is constantly turning and as it does, we are on a 365 day journey around the Sun. The force that holds this in place is our old friend, gravity. A really interesting fact is that our planet is on a tilt and during the year different parts of the world have more sunlight which creates the seasons. If the Earth didn’t tilt we would have the same season all year round!

It was then time to play with our spinning tops which spin with a force called ‘torque’. There is also another force called friction which happens when two surfaces rub together. If you spin your top on a smooth surface there is less friction which means lots of spinning, that is, until gravity catches up. On a rough surface there is lots of friction on the spinning top - so it’s usually a short ride.

Some rather destructive spinning happens when tornadoes are created. Tornadoes occur when cold and warm air suddenly meet and create a spinning motion. Tornadoes travel at about 50 km an hour across land but inside the tornado the wind speed can get up to 500 kms an hour - scary! We then created Tornadoes is a bottle. Using a little ‘Tornado Tube’ we joined two Coke bottles together with water inside them. When we spun the bottle, the water would drain down into the other bottle. As it drained, the water spun like a tornado and created a hole in the middle called a ‘vortex’ which pulled the surrounding water into the middle of the bottle. Many of us had seen something like this before - it was in the bath when we pulled the plug!

Hooray for science - let the revolution continue.