Selecting and developing activities for exploring magnets

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.