Selecting and developing activities for electrical loops
Classroom Activity
for 5-11
Ideas to emphasise here
- The complete loop, working all together
- Something moving round, everywhere in the loop
- Build on the idea that something is used up as the battery flattens
- Relate your model of something moving around the loop to actions in adding elements to a loop
- Connect toolkits for thinking with physical experiences with circuits
Teacher Tip: Work through the Physics Narratives to find these lines of thinking worked out and then look in the Classroom Activities for some examples of activities
Strategies for supporting learning
- Draw out, and challenge 'wrong track' thinking
- Link practical experiences to developing descriptions
- Let children use pictures, diagrams, physical actions and physical models as well as words to express themselves
- Develop a toolkit to support children's reasoning about circuits
- Allow children to question and explore different explanations
- Retain a focus on whole loops
- Link practical experience to developing descriptions
- Relate children's pictures, diagrams, physical actions and physical models to what happens when real circuits are built
- Encourage children to reason about circuits, making and testing predictions
- Use large drawings of circuits to help relate the physical to the drawings
Teacher Tip: These are all related to findings about children's ideas from research. The teaching activities will provide some suggestions. So will colleagues, near and far.
Avoid these
- Not challenging imprecise language, reasoning, diagramming
- Using sequential models, such as donation models
- 'Electrical energy'
- Telling long stories about electrons in wires as 'just how it is'
- Sequential reasoning: 'first it leaves the battery, then it...'
- Just stating what 'should have happened
- Relating ad hoc rules as 'just how it is'
- Conflating homely analogies with ways of reasoning that can make predictions
Teacher Tip: These difficulties are distilled from: the research findings; the practice of well-connected teachers with expertise; issues intrinsic to representing the physics well.