Download progression document
Includes statements from Development Matters (birth to age five) and the relevant ELGs in full, for the Balancing provocation
Early Learning Goal links
- Mathematics ELG: Numerical Patterns
- Understanding the World ELG: Past and Present
- Understanding the World ELG: People, Culture and Communities
- Understanding the World ELG: The Natural World
- Expressive Arts and Design ELG: Creating with Materials
Characteristics of effective learning
Play, Be, C Units provide enabling environments with teaching and support from adults. Reflecting on the characteristics of effective teaching and learning, children will have opportunity to learn and develop by:
- Playing and exploring – children investigate and experience things, and ‘have a go’.
- Active learning – children concentrate and keep on trying if they encounter difficulties and enjoy achievements.
- Creating and thinking critically – children have and develop their own ideas, make links between ideas, and develop strategies for doing things.
Early Years Foundation Stage Statutory Framework: accessed November 2024. Available under the Open Government Licence v3.0.
What you will need
- Balancing Act by Ellen Stoll Walsh
- Scales with two buckets and objects from around the setting to go in them
- Tape, ropes, beams, benches
- See saws, logs, planks
- The civil engineer poster
Duration
- 10 to 15 minutes
STEM vocabulary to introduce
Balance, stable, unstable, wobbly, heavy, heavier, light, lighter, tall, taller, short, shorter, wide, wider, narrow, narrower, the same, equal, bigger, smaller, more, less.
What to do – before you start
You may want to read Balancing Act by Ellen Stoll Walsh to introduce the concept of balancing before you start. Tell the children you are going to give them lots of different balancing challenges. They are going to need to be resilient like civil engineers and will need to keep trying until they can make things balance.
Using scales to balance
You will need scales with two buckets and containers that you can fit objects into. You might be lucky enough to have a few different types of these scales that you can use. Challenge the children to make the scales balance. You could start with putting an object in one of the buckets and ask the children if they can make it balance. You could ask:
- What does balanced mean?
- What will the buckets look like if they are balanced?
- Which side is heavier? How do you know?
- Which side is lighter? How do you know?
- How will you make them the same?
- How can you make that side go down?
- How can you make that side go up?
- Can you find any more objects that balance?
If you have Numicon in your setting, they have the correct weights for balancing different combinations, for example, two of the one pieces will weigh the same as one of the two pieces, a one piece and a two piece will weigh the same as a three piece and so on.
Balancing yourself along a line
Set up a balancing track using planks, benches, ropes or tape on the floor. Ask the children to walk along it. You could ask:
- How do you stay on the line?
- How do you stop yourself from falling off?
- What are you doing with your body?
- How do you balance your body?
- Do you need to lean to one side?
If you have set up a track along a straight line, you could investigate whether the children find it easier or more difficult to walk along a wobbly line, or a line that turns around corners. You could ask the children if they think it is easier to stay on the track when they move slowly or when they move quickly.
Using a seesaw to balance
If you have a seesaw at your setting, you could use this to investigate balance. You could ask:
- How do you get the seesaw to balance?
- How many children are on that side?
- Which side is heavier?
- Which side is lighter?
- What happens if we put all of the children on one side?
- How can you make the seesaw go up at that end?
- How can you make that end go down?
Using large blocks to balance
Challenge the children to stack large wooden blocks, plank and logs so they can balance on them.
Safety note: You will know if this activity is safe for your children to try, and where and how to do the activity safely in your setting.
You could ask:
- How do you balance that plank on the log?
- What are you doing with your body?
- Which way do you need to lean?
- Which are the best blocks/logs/planks for balancing? Why?
- Which is the best way to stack them so that you can climb on them?
Remember to refer to the children as civil engineers and praise them for using the attributes. You could say things like:
“You were resilient like a civil engineer as you kept trying until you could balance.”
Other things to try
You may have plenty of other equipment at your setting that you could use to set balancing challenges. This could include bikes, climbing frames, gym balls, balance boards, stepping stones, bean bags on heads or egg and spoon races.
The science of civil engineering
We have put together some useful information about the science of civil engineering to accompany this activity. Don’t worry, this is for your information only and to help you answer any questions children may have. We don’t expect you to explain this to the children in your setting!
How does a balance scale work?
We often use scales and balances interchangeably to weigh things, but a balances measure mass, while scales measure weight. Weight is the amount of force on an object due to gravity where as mass is the measure of the amount of matter in an object. Your mass stays the same whether you are on Earth or the Moon but you weigh less on the Moon as it has less gravity than the Earth. A balance determines mass by balancing an unknown mass against a known mass. It has a balanced beam and two pans. When the pans contain exactly the same mass the beam is in balance.
Why is it hard to balance yourself on one leg?
The centre of gravity of an object is the point that an object’s weight will balance around. For people, this point changes depending on your position (arms up, arms down, leaning to one side, turning a somersault). When you are standing up straight with both feet on the floor or walking naturally, your centre of gravity is approximately in the area behind your belly button.
When you stand on one leg you change the position of your centre of gravity slightly. You need to wave and wobble your arms and other leg around until your centre of gravity is in position above the centre of the foot you are standing on. You will then be balanced and more stable.
Why is it hard to balance yourself walking on a line or beam?
When you are walking naturally, your centre of gravity is approximately in the area behind your belly button. When we walk we adjust the muscles in our feet, arms and legs to maintain balance. Walking along a line or balance beam is tricky as our base (where our feet are positioned) has narrowed. To stop ourselves from falling off the line, we may bend our knees to lower our centre of gravity and get it nearer to our base of support, our feet. This makes it less likely that we will fall over.
Why is it hard to balance yourself on a slope or unsteady blocks?
When you are standing up straight with both feet on a flat, stable surface, your centre of gravity is approximately in the area behind your belly button.
If we are on a sloping or unstable surface, our centre of gravity has shifts and it no longer above our base (our feet). This causes us to become unstable. We need to reposition our bodies and redistribute our weight to make sure we don’t topple over, usually by leaning to one side.
How does a seesaw work?
A seesaw is a first-order lever. A lever is a simple machine which helps us to lift objects. It has a long arm and a fulcrum, which is where the arm pivots. The object you are lifting is called the load, and the force you apply to the arm to make the object move is called the effort. On a seesaw, the downward applied force of the rider at one end of the seesaw translates across the fulcrum to lift the rider at the other end. Moving the fulcrum closer to a larger rider increases the effectiveness of the force from a smaller rider.
