Simon has been teaching Physics for over 27 years in British state schools and international school around the world. He specializes in International Baccalaureate, A level and IGCSE. He is now head of the secondary school at the British School of Tashkent, a Nord Anglia school and in August he will become International Principal of NAS Guangzhou Panyu. He is a regular contributor to the Times Educational Supplement and is one of their "Subject geniuses" for Science.
Simon has been teaching Physics for over 27 years in British state schools and international school around the world. He specializes in International Baccalaureate, A level and IGCSE. He is now head of the secondary school at the British School of Tashkent, a Nord Anglia school and in August he will become International Principal of NAS Guangzhou Panyu. He is a regular contributor to the Times Educational Supplement and is one of their "Subject geniuses" for Science.
Perfect for a concise Periodic table and bonding revision lesson. Covers properties of groups and ionic/covalent/metallic bonding with lots of examples. Useful for flipped learning too.
Originally written for a top year 9 group, this is suitable for GCSE too. Causes of acid rain, composition of air, nitrogen oxides, climate change, ozone layer. It's all here presented in a clear and humorous style. Excellent activity at the end too.
Suitable for all levels, KS2, KS3 or KS4 (let's presume by KS5 they've got it!). Ask the class to name each symbol before revealing the answer. Some funny "symbols" too! Finish by constructing some simple circuits around the class and getting the class to draw them as diagrams in a "circus" style activity.
Good starter or finish to a revision lesson. Students can either do thumbs up/down, hold up cards or move to different sides of the room. Good assessment exercise too.
This could be used at KS3, 4 or even 5 level. A fun practical using multimeters and pencil lines to measure the relationship between resistance and length.
Lesson PowerPoint, worksheet and practical sheet. Written for IGCSE but suitable for GCSE and even A level. In the practical they can compare their results with the actual results and discuss why their results for the SHC is larger than the accepted value.
Presentation plus latent heat question sheet. The practical referred to in the presentation is the cooling of molten wax in hot water. I like to put the wax in a boiling tube in the beaker of hot water and take the temperature of the wax and the water as they cool to emphasise that the wax stops cooling when it reaches its melting point. This then leads into a discussion of latent heat followed by example calculations etc.
I introduce mind-mapping in my first lesson with a class. I build up a mind-map about myself on the smartboard as a way of introduction – all my students now know I hate dogs and banks, support Nottingham Forest, love Physics and listen to Bruckner and RUSH. I then get students to do their own mind-map in the front of their books about themselves – making sure they use colour and illustrations to make them think and make the mind-map more memorable.
For this Rocks lesson you can use their mind-mapping skills by putting notes on a PowerPoint set to “loop” and students have to organize the notes into a mind-map. Go to “Set-up slide show” and check the “loop continuously until ‘esc’” box. Then go to “Animations” and click on “Advance slide automatically” and put 10 seconds between each slide. It normally takes about 4 or 5 repetitions of the loop for students to complete their maps. This is especially useful for topics which are content heavy and where students need to remember facts such as Rocks or Radioactivity.
Digestion PowerPoint featuring all stages of digestion with humour too! "Draw the sentence" exercise to finish. Students have to "Draw" 8 sentences about digestion - ideally no more than one word per drawing. get them to divide a page into 8 boxes to do this. This is an excellent assessment technique to demonstrate their understanding of the Powerpoint. Suitable for KS3 and lower groups in KS4.
Presentation recaps heat transfer by conduction, convection and radiation in humorous style. This is then applied to how a vacuum flask works and students then complete the cut-out and stick worksheet. Good for KS3 and KS4.
You can’t beat an easy lung dissection to get students interested and possibly a little nauseous! Hopefully at the time of writing there are still some actual butchers shops surviving out there and you have no problem getting your hands on some sheep or pigs lungs, especially if you have an obliging laboratory technician to help. Try to get some with oesophagus and trachea attached.
I usually set the lab up beforehand to look as much like an operating room as possible. A table at the centre covered in white sheets, stage lighting if available, and if you can get hold of some scrubs even better (although a lab coat and a stethoscope will do). Teaching is partly a theatrical performance after all! I normally have stools arranged around a central bench – “in the round” so to speak.
Start by bringing attention to the smooth surface of the lungs and discuss how this helps, along with the pleural fluid, the lungs to move in relation to the rib cage. Remind the class of the role of the diaphragm contracting beneath the lungs and the intercostal muscles expanding the rib cage. Show where approximately the diaphragm is in relation to your rib-cage – it’s much higher than most people imagine. Being a good physicist I will explain how the air is PUSHED into the lungs by the surrounding air pressure - “In Physics, there is no such thing as suck!”
Contrast the flexible cilia-lined trachea made of cartilage with the muscular lined oesophagus. You can remind them of peristalsis by squeezing a Smarty down the esophagus with your fingers (it’s when it appears at the other end you might see a few green faces). Discuss the role of cilia in keeping dirt particles out of the lungs and how smoking can affect their action.
Before cutting the lung itself, inflate it using a blower (cue a couple more green faces). Then cut down the trachea with scissors, branching off into the bronchi, remembering also to discuss the role of surface area in the functioning of the alveoli. Cut a piece of lung and put it on water to show how light it is compared with a piece of meat, which sinks. You can ask “What would happen if the sheep/lung had drowned?” I normally finish by cutting a cross-section across a whole lung horizontally to show the lung riddled with cartilage bronchioles, explaining that’s why we don’t normally eat lungs!
I will usually then get the students to do a “Draw the sentence” exercise (my favourite) where they convert 8 simple sentences about the action of the lungs into drawings.
