Thinking about actions to take: Earth-Moon-Sun

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

Try these

• teaching a sequence determined by the complexity of model explaining the illumination
• relating your models to observations that the children make, both inside and outside the laboratory
• paying attention to the issue of relative scale in your depictions
• ensuring that the phenomena to be modelled are well characterised before the modelling starts

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

• assuming that the models are obvious
• building models without the physical experiences that make them seem real
• not running the models once they are built, so that you can show how they work
• not relating the models back to the observations

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.