Thinking about actions to take: Contact Forces

There's a good chance you could improve your teaching if you were to:

Try these

• Building explicit connections between the actions of animate and inanimate environments on an object
• Building in explicitly the steps from physical situation to the forces acting on the object
• Modelling how you come to expect a warp force to be acting
• Discussing the placement of arrows
• Focusing on the physical reasons for expecting a force to be acting – e.g. the bombardment by particles
• Sharing tangible examples of frictional forces
• Arranging for children to experience drag forces in air

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.

Avoid these

• Using friction as a blanket term, without reference to its physical origins
• Treating contact forces exerted by inanimate objects as obvious
• Stating, without sharing the appropriate experiences that give the statements meaning
• Being drawn into discussing the details of the drag forces

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.