Magnet
Electricity and Magnetism

Selecting and developing activities for exploring magnets

Classroom Activity for 5-11 Supporting Physics Teaching

Teacher Tip: Based on the Physics Narrative and the Teaching and Learning Issues

Ideas to emphasise here

  • one thing acts on another without touching it
  • the physical experience of feeling the interactions between magnets, or between a magnetic material and a magnet
  • distinguishing between a permanent magnet, and magnetic materials
  • magnets have two different ends, which we call North or South poles
  • no matter how small you cut a magnet you always have two poles
  • like poles (South and South or North and North) repel each other
  • different poles (South and North or North and South) attract each other
  • a few, but not all, metals are attracted to magnets. These metals are iron, cobalt, nickel or their alloys – like steel
  • you can make a new magnet by stroking an existing magnet on a piece of iron

Teacher Tip: Work through the Physics Narrative to find these lines of thinking worked out and then look in the Teaching Approaches for some examples of activities.

Strategies for supporting learning

  • distinguish action at a distance from action by contact
  • build a way of thinking about permanent magnets that supports children being able to make predictions
  • having in mind an explicit model of permanent magnets
  • root your approach in the phenomena; a full theory of magnets is very complex
  • being consistent in the drawing of force arrows
  • ensuring that children have access to a variety of representations when asking for descriptions
  • use a sequence that encourages children to formulate ideas about an unseen force

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

  • listing rules about attracting and repelling as simple ad-hoc statements
  • conflating magnetic and gravitational effects – more easily done than you might expect as both are action-at-a-distance forces
  • suggesting that gravity is a magnetic effect
  • presenting magnetism as a series of unlinked effects

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.

Magnet
can be analysed using Magnetic Field
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