How does light travel?

During our light unit, we have been discovering how light travels. First we found evidence for the claim that light travels in a straight path. When we shined it through a comb, we saw that light rays spread out as they travel.

Then we set up mirror obstacle courses to bounce light along a path. The students planned their courses first, using rulers to draw straight lines to show the predicted path of reflected light.

Next, everyone tested their plan to see if they could reflect the light along the planned path.

Another experiment we tried was to see how things looked different when we looked at images through water. We discovered that water definitely stretched and magnified text and images. Next, we learned that was called refraction, when the light bends as it travels from air to water.