I'm in love with Force and Motion Right Now

I am in the last part of a delivering an advanced science training to early educators on force and motion concepts and the ride has been fantastic. 

We started with a webinar through which we explored Newton's laws of motion:

1. An object at rest will remain at rest unless is acted upon by a force
2. Accelerations happens when a force acts on a mass. The greater the mass, the greater the amount of force needed to accelerate the object

We also introduced terms like speed, velocity and the difference between mass and weight. 

Next, the participants read a few great articles to deepen their thinking. Then we got together for a four-hour face to face training in which we grappled with these concepts. We came to grips with the fact that an object did not have to be moving to have a force acting on it. A book on a table has gravity (a force) pulling it down. And, an object in motion does not always have a force acting on it. A force may have got it starting. And acceleration is any change in speed, up or down, which was just crazy to those of us who think of the accelerator in our car as only going faster. We also talked about how friction slows things down, the amount of friction varies from surface to surface (think ice versus sand).

Then we played with the concepts. We had big and small trucks. We changed their mass by filling them with large rocks and tried to move them, noticing that it took more force to move the fuller, more massive truck. We played with the motion of cars going down ramps, guessing which ones would go further and noticing if their acceleration changed at all based on how we built the pathway.And we rolled things over sandpaper, paper towels, bubble wrap, and wood.

Today, I have been reading all the the participants reflections on the experiments and inquiry with kids. My favorite was the teacher who took advantage of our recent ice storm who did friction experiments with the kids outside. They tested different "sleds" and "surfaces." They slid on ice and gravel and they used traditional sleds, carpet squares, and lunch trays. Another participant's students used their own bodies as inclines to roll balls down. Sweet. What everyone learned as they explored the concepts with their children was that they needed to allow they kids time to explore with the new materials they were introducing, whether it be rain gutters, cars, balls, marbles, trucks, sleds, trays, etc., before they began to talk about the concepts of pushes and pulls and friction. They all agreed that kids were able to come up with their own questions. 

I have had so much fun exploring a science topic deeply with early educators and then listening to how they apply it with their children. I am so excited to see how the next group I bring this to in February uses the information with their kids. I hope it sparks these educators to bring inquiry into their classrooms on a variety of scientific topics.