Why not take a
dvantage of a bright sunny day to teach your students about the way light travels, refracts, and reflects? Using the United Prism Set you can easily create classroom activities that are as beautiful as they are scientific and informative. The Prism Set contains six acrylic prisms in five different shapes, including an equilateral prism, a rectangular block, a semi-circular block, as well as concave and convex lenses. The accompanying teaching guide gives sample activities as well as a short history on the study of light to aid in your lessons.
Using the prism set, ask your students to make inferences about how a double concave lens refracts light, to hypothesize what path light will take traveling through a rectangular prism, and to investigate what happens during magnification with a rounded prism. Through classroom discussion of the operations of geometry, the changes in density, and the nature of light, your students will learn the science behind their magical interactions with the colourful rays.
To explore the learning opportunities of rainbow beams, you can find the United Prism Set on display on the Ground Floor coffee table near the circulation desk in the OISE library. You can also view an image of this kit, and other activity kits, in the OISE Library K-12 Manipulatives Database.