Making a temporary magnet

Our Friday topic session for Magnets involved experimenting to see if we could turn a metal object into a temporary magnet. We began by choosing either a pair of scissors, a nail or a needle and one magnet. We had to stroke our metal object in one direction about 50x and then experimented to see if it had enough of a magnetic force to attract paper clips.

Rylee and Elliot start working on stroking scissors with a magnet

It wasn't long before we had some paper clips hanging from the scissors as we had indeed created temporary magnets. The race was now on to see who could hang the most paper clips from their 'magnetic' scissors....


Izack and Josh were two of the first students to get a chain hanging from their scissors

A fun photo to finish with

WE FOUND OUT THAT..... we could transfer the magnetic force to a metal object to create a temporary magnet, but that is what it was - 'temporary'. It didn't take long for the magnetic force to decrease and our paper clips started to fall. We do wonder though why scissors were easy to magnetise but the nail and the needle didn't work so well.

CHALLENGE FOR ROOM 4 STUDENTS - find out if you can create a temporary magnet at home with another metal object. If you can, come to school and tell us all about it.