Big Idea 12: Motion of Objects

In this lesson, students identify ways to make objects move while recording their techniques. Students then engineer a track that will place an object as close to an exact location as possible. Students will test and revise their tracks.

Type: Lesson Plan

The Fire Wheels MEA provides students with a problem in which they must work as a team to design a procedure to select the best toy car for a company to sell.

Model Eliciting Activities, MEAs, are open-ended, interdisciplinary problem-solving activities that are meant to reveal students’ thinking about the concepts embedded in realistic situations. Click here to learn more about MEAs and how they can transform your classroom.

Type: Lesson Plan

This lesson provides students an opportunity recognizing the properties of objects and how objects move as well as working collaboratively to solve an engineering design challenge. This lesson is not the first introduction to sorting objects by their properties and observing how objects move, but a way for children to apply the concept in a more in-depth manner.

Type: Lesson Plan

The students will be able to explain how a push or pull affects how an object moves, the difference of a push and pull, and the way to change how something is moving is to give it a push or a pull.

Type: Lesson Plan

In this lesson students explore the force of gravity by testing gravity's pull with parachutes. The students will investigate the idea of gravity pulling objects to the ground unless something holds it up.

Type: Lesson Plan

This lesson provides the opportunity for students to practice changing matter by cutting, tearing, and/or rearranging materials in order to make an object that can defy gravity over moving air. This lesson incorporates design challenge aspects at a level that is appropriate for young students who are just beginning their formal education.

Type: Lesson Plan

Explore how different objects move in different ways by working through this interactive tutorial.

Type: Original Student Tutorial

Students will explore various ways that aircraft can move and identify descriptive words for motion using this PowerPoint eReader.

Type: Presentation/Slideshow

Count down from 10 with this cute poem as pilots explore the motion of different types of aircraft. Adapt how this animated and narrated resource is used for a variety of content explorations.

Type: Presentation/Slideshow

Students will observe and discuss motion in learning stations or in demonstration. They will observe and discuss how a push or pull affects motion.

Type: Teaching Idea

Students explore a variety of objects to discover the many ways the objects move-up and down, straight line, in circles, back and forth. They will discover that a force (push or pull) makes it move.

Type: Teaching Idea

In this guided inquiry activity, students will use 2 marbles of different size and a box to investigate what makes the marbles move and what will cause the marbles to change speed and direction.

Type: Teaching Idea

This unit introduces the terms "fast" and "slow" in regards to motion objects and explore how different objects move.

Type: Unit/Lesson Sequence