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.