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You know some forces pull without touching. Leo holds a ball out in the air and lets go. Nothing is holding it up any more.
What happens to the ball?
Gravity & Falling Objects
Explain that unsupported objects fall towards the Earth because of the force of gravity acting between the Earth and the falling object
What a learner can do afterwards
- Define gravity as a force of attraction between the Earth and objects
- Explain that unsupported objects fall because gravity pulls them towards the Earth
- Give examples showing gravity in action (dropping objects, jumping, water flowing downhill)
1 · Read
You already know that a non-contact force can push or pull without touching. Gravity is a non-contact force. Earth pulls every object towards it, all the time, even when nothing is touching that object. This pull on an object is its weight. Weight is a force, so it is not the same as mass, the amount of stuff in the object.
Try it together
Leo holds a ball above the ground, then lets go. Nothing is holding the ball up anymore, so gravity pulls it straight down until it lands. This happens every single time you drop something.
The same force acts when you jump. Your legs push you up for a moment, but gravity keeps pulling, so you always come back down.
Try it together
Rain lands on a hill and trickles down to the bottom. It never flows uphill on its own. The same pull that drops a ball pulls the water down.
Drop a heavy and a light ball together from the same height. Many people guess the heavy one lands first. If air barely slows either, they land together. Gravity pulls the heavy one harder, but it needs a bigger pull to get moving, so the two even out.
To spot gravity at work, ask what holds the object up. If nothing does, it falls. If a shelf, a string or the ground holds it, gravity still pulls, and the support pushes back just as hard. Take the support away and it falls straight away.
Gravity is the pulling force between the Earth and every object, so anything unsupported falls towards the Earth.
The rewritten readings were written for this dataset. Practice items x1, x2, x3 and x4 are original to this dataset.
2 · Watch
3 · Play
Try it yourself
Drop a heavy ball and a light one together. Call the winner first, then try the feather.
Take it off screen
Print a worksheetA4 with an answer key page for grown-ups. No screen, no internet.
Where it sits
Where this leads
Jobs that lean on this skill. Follow one to see everything it is built on.
Then practise
28 questions wait behind this lesson, each with its answer explained. Every answer feeds the sky: stars light as they are learned, and dim when it is time to come back.