Lesson Plan of the Week
Hello Scientists, before we get started on this week’s topic, I wanted to take a second to share with you a great moment that I had at Lafayette Elementary School this past week. I arrived on campus and was walking into the school when one of the teachers standing outside helping with carpool that morning quickly stopped me. He began telling me that his son was in 5th grade, and that the day before, I was teaching his class our lesson “Forced to Change”. That evening, he began telling his parents everything that we had covered in class that day including the topics we discussed as well as the experiments that we did and that he had a great time.
I have to say, that after three months as the Manager of the RDU location, this has to be my most memorable moment so far. I was so excited to hear that the child has such a great time. Since there was so much excitement with that lesson, I figured it would be worth going back and letting you all know more about what we did.
Forced to Change has everything to do with Sir Isaac Newton and his discovery of Gravity as well as his three laws of motion. Newton’s first law of motion has to do with Inertia, which is the physical force that says that an object at rest stays at rest and that an object in motion stays in motion unless a force either makes it move or stop.
We next talked about Newton’s second law of motion that states that the acceleration of an object is directly equal to the size of the object and the force acting on the object.
Newton’s third law of motion states that for every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction. This experiment was really exciting. One at a time, the children came over to me and stood on a round, rotating platform. I then handed them a wheel with two handles on it. The kids would stay on the platform and I would spin the wheel quickly. As the children rotated their hands from left to right, they would rotate in the opposite direction they were turning the wheel. In order to keep them interested while I was doing this experiment, the kids were able to explore working with incline planes.
As you can see, we all had a fun, exciting and busy lesson on Sir Isaac Newton’s Laws of Motion. I bet you can’t wait to hear about our next super exciting lesson!
