KS3 ~ Year 7 ~ Reflection

This lesson is designed for the Activate KS3 Science Course, specifically Year 7 P3 ’Light’.

For more lessons designed for KS3 and KS4 please visit my shop at: https://www.tes.com/teaching-resources/shop/SWiftScience.

This lesson begins with a recap on what was learned last lesson - students will be given a set of three descriptions and will need to decide which group of materials it is describing. This task can then be checked using the answers provided.

Next, students are shown (with a diagram) what happens when light hits a reflective materials such as a mirror. The incident ray, reflected ray, normal line and angles of both incidence and reflection are labelled - students can sketch a diagram of this into their books. They then need to complete the ‘fill-in-the-gap’ task which outlines the law of reflection - the angle of incidence is equal to the angle of reflection.

Students are then shown the different reflections which can be produced by different surfaces - diffuse or specular. Students can consider why a clear image is produced by a smooth surface and why a blurry image is produced by a rough surface. After a short class discussion, students can take notes of this in their books, along with sketches of the two types of reflection.

Next, students will get to investigate the law of reflection. They will be given a practical worksheet which outlines a method by which students will direct a beam of light from a ray-box to a mirror, they should measure the angle of incidence and angle of reflection. This should be repeated with various angles of incidence, their results can be recorded in the table provided.

Next, students are asked a set of progress check questions to test their knowledge of what they have learned so far on reflection. This task can be self-assessed once it is complete, using the mark scheme provided on the PowerPoint.

The plenary task requires students to complete one of the following ‘sentence starters’ that are provided to provide a summary of what they have learned this lesson.

All resources are included at the end of the presentation. Thanks for looking, if you have any questions please let me know in the comments section and any feedback would be appreciated :)