A fridge magnet, a scattered pile of household objects, and a child sorting them into two genuinely surprising piles: things that stick, and things that don’t. The Magnet Hunt turns an ordinary household magnet into a proper scientific sorting investigation.
What you need
One or more magnets (a fridge magnet, a horseshoe magnet, anything on hand). A varied collection of small household objects: coins, paperclips, a spoon, a plastic toy, a rubber band, a key, a piece of aluminium foil, a drinks can.
How to play
Lay out the collected objects and ask your child to predict, before testing anything, which ones they think the magnet will stick to. Many children guess based on whether something looks metallic, which turns out to be a genuinely useful, if slightly wrong, assumption worth testing directly.
Test each object one at a time, and sort them into two piles: attracted to the magnet, and not attracted. Compare the actual results to the predictions, and specifically point out any surprises, an aluminium can, for instance, generally will not stick, despite clearly being metal, which is a nice, concrete prompt for the real lesson here.
The real lesson
Explain that magnets don’t attract all metal, only certain ones, mainly iron, nickel, and cobalt, or things made from them (steel, which contains iron, is a common one). Most other metals, aluminium, copper, gold, are not magnetic at all, regardless of how metallic they look or feel.
Go back through the “not attracted” pile specifically and ask your child to guess which objects are metal but still didn’t stick, reinforcing that “shiny and metal-looking” and “magnetic” are two genuinely different things.
Using a compass
If you have a simple compass, show your child how its needle always settles pointing in the same direction, and explain that this is because the needle itself is a small magnet, responding to the Earth’s own, much larger magnetic field. Bring a strong magnet close to the compass (not touching it) and watch the needle swing to follow it instead, a nice demonstration that the compass needle is reacting to magnetism generally, not specifically to the Earth.
Variations
Test whether a magnet’s pull works through different materials: can it still attract a paperclip through a sheet of paper? Through a thin plastic tub? Through water, with the paperclip submerged in a glass? This extends the investigation into a genuinely interesting new question about how magnetic force travels.
Why it works
A magnet is familiar to almost every child, stuck to a fridge covered in drawings and photos, but very few have ever been asked to actually investigate what it will and won’t attract, and why. Turning an ordinary object into a genuine sorting investigation, complete with a prediction that often turns out wrong, builds real scientific thinking: notice a pattern, test it, and be ready to revise what you believed when the evidence says otherwise.
