Explaining Motion: Student Exercises and Teacher Guide for Grade Ten Academic Science - Softcover

Ross, Jim

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1897007175 ISBN 13: 9781897007174

Publisher: Ross Lattner Educational Consultants, 2004

Synopsis

Understanding motion is difficult... no longer!

Perhaps you remember the approach you experienced in high school. It started with time, distance and mass, three concepts that took thousands of years for the best minds in humanity to finally sort out. IntuitivPhysics re-presents this traditionally difficult material using three simple diagrams that work with, not against, students' experience of motion.

For example, your child sees a soccer ball lying motionless, and gives the ball a kick toward a friend. The ball moves smoothly toward the friend, who stops the ball with another nudge, leaving the ball motionless once again. We will study four aspects of that motion over four weeks.

1. Students will learn to draw velocity:time graphs, an idea that teenagers find easy to understand. Then we learn to analyze that graph for displacement and acceleration. Students will calculate distance (displacement) as the area under a v:t graph. And of course acceleration is the slope of the v:t graph.
2. In their muscles, bones, tendons and nerves, children have a natural intuitive understanding of impulse, the ooomph! that gets a ball moving or stopping. We will make the most of their intuitive understanding: this Ooomph! is known to physicists as Δp, (change in momentum).
3. Forces are present whenever momentum is exchanged. We will make use of the v:t graph and the concept of impulse to develop a simple model of force. This brief treatment of force is only enough to explain the events that the students are studying.
4. Motion in 2 dimensions brings the student to a more realistic portrayal of moving objects in sports. Momentum offers the most effective subject for beginners to learn about vectors.

Every two-page pencil-and-paper student exercise has its own two-page parent / teacher guide, to help you teach your child. Your student will investigate the motions of bicycles, soccer balls, and their own bodies in everyday play, using diagrams. All your child needs is a pencil, some paper, and basic addition, subtraction multiplication and division. No algebra!

About this title

About the Author

Jim Ross has more than 34 years experience in science education, both in private and public school systems. For six years he was the Coordinator of Investigative Studies at Nicholson Catholic College, Belleville, ON, where his portfolio included science, math, history, geography, and the social sciences. In 1988, Jim Ross and Mike Lattner founded Ross Lattner Educational Consultants, a small, independent publishing company, to meet the need for high quality curriculum materials in the de-streamed common curriculum. Ross Lattner continues to publish innovative instructional strategies. Jim's M.Ed. thesis, The Graininess of Everyday Thinking, examined the cognitive structure of students' everyday language, and how it is related to students' natural reasoning about physical phenomena. From 2001-2005, Jim taught the pedagogy courses in Chemistry, Physics and Intermediate Science at the Faculty of Education at the University of Western Ontario. In that capacity, he was awarded the honour of Teacher of the Year by the the Faculty of Ed. Jim has served as president of the Ontario Association of Physics Teachers, and has been an active member of STAO. He has contributed to the writing of the Ontario senior physics curriculum documents. Entering an active retirement in 2008, Jim contributed to McGraw-Hill Ryerson's Grade 9 and 10 "ON Science" texts. As he continues to study and write, he has been constructing the new approach to chemistry learning and teaching with Edvantage Press, and is an active member of the Edvantage Chemistry Interactive online community.

Edition details

• Publisher: Ross Lattner Educational Consultants
• Publication date: 2004
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1897007175
• ISBN 13: 9781897007174
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 83