Gravitational Potential Energy and Elastic Energy (Inc. Required Practical Extension of a Spring)

This lesson includes the required practical for extension of a spring. I prefer to teach this together, as it helps the pupils to make connections with elastic energy and force and has been a success so far with students gaining grades 8-9 in GCSE’s.
You can, if you prefer, easily split this into two lessons, teaching the required practical later on, and add some additional exercises to practice calculating GPE and differentiating by including some unit conversions for a challenge. You could even add a small practical for the first half; getting the pupils to weigh an object then lift it as high as they can to find out who had the most GPE. Just a suggestion anyway.

Quick Summary of lesson:

• Title slide/intro with starter and extension, progress indicators (levelled 1-9 according to Bloom’s taxonomy, albeit, not stated as depends on how your school would like it displayed, e.g. some, most, all; 1-9; etc), keywords.
• Defining and comparing potential energy and gravitational potential energy
• Calculating GPE with practice questions
• Required practical - Extension of a spring - includes apparatus, method, formula, example calculations/table/graphs (incorporating how to calculate spring constant with detailed explanation using a graph and formula), analysis and conclusion
• Extension looking at the relationship between loss in potential energy and gain in elastic energy as the extension of a spring increases.
• Extension explaining limit of proportionality
• Plenary/homework suggestion

All notes/questioning/link suggestions in the notes section for each slide.