Family table: Sound

All four rungs side by side. A younger child and an older one can do the same topic together, each at their own level.

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Step	Classes 1–3	Classes 4–7	Classes 8–10	Classes 11–12
Activity	Making and Hearing Sounds	Pitch and Loudness	Speed of Sound and Reflection (Echo)	Investigating Sound Waves
Safety	Do not strike glass. Stretch rubber bands away from faces. Keep sounds at a comfortable level, and never make a loud sound close to someone's ear.	Help keep experiments fair. Stretch rubber bands away from faces. If you use glass bottles, tap them gently yourself.	–	Keep signal generators, speakers and headphones at low volume, and never put headphones on while a tone is playing loudly. Very high-pitched tones can be uncomfortable for some people even when quiet.
What you need	Objects that can make sound (steel plate and spoon, rubber band stretched over a box, a drum or an upturned tin, your voice)	Rubber bands of different thickness, an open box or tin, a ruler 3–4 identical plastic bottles with different water levels (for blowing) Optional, with a grown-up: identical glass bottles to tap gently with a pencil	Open ground in front of a large flat wall (at least 50 m away from it), two wooden blocks to clap, stopwatch, measuring tape (or a known distance)	Depends on investigation (signal generator and loudspeaker, oscilloscope or phone apps, resonance tube, tuning forks)
Notice	What sounds can you hear right now?	Some sounds are high and some are low; some are loud and some are quiet.	Sometimes we hear an echo. Sound takes time to travel.	Sound is a longitudinal wave with frequency, wavelength and amplitude.
Guess	How is sound made? What do you need to do to make a sound?	What makes a sound higher or lower? What makes it louder?	How can we use an echo to estimate the speed of sound?	How are frequency, wavelength and speed related? How does amplitude affect loudness?
Try	Make sounds by tapping, plucking, blowing or speaking. Gently touch the object, or your throat while you hum, to feel the shaking.	Pluck rubber bands of different tightness and thickness. Hold a ruler over a table edge and twang it with different lengths sticking out. Blow across the tops of the plastic bottles.	Stand a measured distance d from the wall. Clap the blocks, listen for the echo, and keep clapping so that each clap lands exactly on the echo of the one before. When the rhythm is steady, a partner times 20 claps.	Design an investigation to measure or demonstrate relationships (e.g., frequency and pitch, resonance in tubes).
Observe	Which objects shake (vibrate) when they make sound?	Record which conditions give a higher pitch and which give a louder sound. Change only one thing at a time.	Repeat three times. Calculate the time for one clap (total time ÷ 20) and a rough speed.	Collect data and present it graphically where possible.
Explain	Tell someone that sound is made when something vibrates.	Link pitch to how fast something vibrates and loudness to how strongly (how far) it vibrates.	Show the calculation: in the time between claps, the sound goes to the wall and back, so speed = 2d ÷ (time for one clap). Discuss accuracy.	Analyse results using the wave equation (v = fλ) and discuss limitations.
Ask another question	Can sound travel through a wall or through water?	If you tap the bottles instead of blowing, is the order of the notes the same? How do musical instruments change pitch and loudness?	Why do we not usually hear echoes in a small room?	How is knowledge of sound waves applied in medicine, music or noise control?

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