This resource provides a useful visual aid set of activities for the ‘energy in food’ or ‘fuel is fuel’ topic. It initiates important discussions about healthy diets, challenges students to use their mathematical skills and enables students to make links between their learning in maths, biology and physics. Students carry out a series of caluclations, including a calculation to see how much of different food types they need to consume to gain their daily recommended amounts of energy.

This resource provides a visual stimulus to initiate discussions on energy efficiency and how to reduce our heating bills. Students are invited to produce a leaflet for house-holders who want to know what they can do to reduce their heating bills, and to design a house that has minimum energy standards. The resources also includes a few big questions relating to the topic.

This simple and easy to use PowerPoint resource provides a useful visual stimulus for discussions on energy efficiency and how the loss of energy can be detrimental to the environment. After discussing dissipation of heat energy, I then introduce the practical investigation. Students are provided with two different light bulbs, a ruler, white piece of paper and a thermometer. Students test to see who of the light bulbs causes the greatest increase in temperature in the thermometer. This light bulb gives out the most heat energy and is therefore the least efficient. This result guides students through planning, recording, analysing and evaluating their experiments.

This simple to use and engaging resource provides a useful framework for a lesson on conduction, convection and radiation. Depending on how much time is available to you, I like to demonstrate conduction through particles by inviting my students to stand next to each other, shoulder to shoulder, vibrating slowly. I then “transfer energy” to one of the students, invting them to vibrate faster, knocking the students (particles) on either side of them, transferring the energy on. To help demonstrate convection, I use the potassium permanganate practical. I usually allow the students to carry out a practical on radiation during the following lesson.

This easy to use, simple resources provides a useful visual for introducing the law of conservation of energy and energy stores. I use it to initiate discussion on the topic and to test initial understanding of the different types of energy stores.

This lesson begins with a ‘graph description’ activity and opportunity for students to make scientific predictions. Included in the first couple of slides are links to useful video resources for the topic. There is then an option of two different practical investigations. The first invites students to design an experiment testing how the gradient of a ramp effects the speed of the car, whilst the second asks how the height you drop the ball from effect the height of the bounce.