For value for money, this resource book is hard to beat. Like most of the Northamptonshire Inspection and Advisory Service material, it is full of activities which will slot straight into the classroom.

Forces is not an easy topic to teach, with its potential for conceptual confusion and perennial questions such as the difference between mass and weight and when to teach it. This book does not fall into any of the traps.

A progression map is given for the entire topic and shows clearly the most complex ideas and those teachers need to be wary of. The activities are a nice mixture of physical hands-on things to do and word or card games which add the minds-on element to the hands-on.

All primary schools should invest in this resource, and secondary teachers should buy one, too, so that they realise how much their incoming pupils may already have covered.

Jerry Wellington is a senior lecturer at Sheffield University Division of