Friction - KS3 Activate

A full 1 hour lesson designed for a mixed ability year 7 class.
This is the third lesson in “Chapter 1 - Forces” from Activate 1, Physics. This lesson is on friction.
This lesson should be suitable to teach to any KS3 Physics class, even by those where physics is not their specialism.
This lesson (and all lessons in this unit) is designed to be interactive and engaging, with plenty of real world examples and independent tasks.
This lesson includes a practical activity where students investigate the speed of a toy car down a ramp where different materials are used on the ramp’s surface.

From this lesson, students should be able to:

1. Give a definition for the key term ‘friction’
2. Explain what causes friction to occur
3. Describe the effect that friction has on moving objects
4. Describe how to reduce the effect of friction
5. Investigate the effect of different material surfaces on the amount of friction a moving object experiences

All of my lesson resources contain:

• A 5-in-5 retrieval-style starter
• An interesting lesson hook, careers link, or retrieval practice to start the lesson
• Teacher input slides with dual coding and reduced cognitive load
• Teacher models
• Regular ‘check for understanding’ slides, such as hand signals quizzes
• Regular student independent practice slides, with optional scaffolds, challenges and answer slides
• A plenary task