In this recorded professional learning session, Greta Dromgool and Ted Cizadlo will build your confidence to teach the Physical World. The New Zealand Curriculum achievement objectives for this area are incredibly broad, and gravity is a lot weirder than we think! Using simple examples, we will take you step by step through how you can teach this concept and unpack students’ alternative conceptions.
LOVED the webinar on gravity – just awesome – thanks so much especially the practical easy experiments for us to do in class.
Teacher
You can download the video and slideshow presentation or add them to a collection.
Index
| Topic | Slideshow number(s) | Video timecode |
| Introducing the Science Learning Hub and presenters | 1–2 | 00:00 |
| Index | 3 | 00:43 |
| Purpose | 4 | 01:12 |
| NZ Curriculum | 5–7 | 02:31 |
| Gravity is an everyday force | 8–9 | 03:58 |
| Gravity is weird and weak | 10–11 | 06:20 |
| Alternative conceptions and concept cartoons | 12–13 | 10:03 |
| Mass vs weight | 14 | 11:28 |
| How gravity works | 15 | 15:41 |
| Other resources | 16 | 41:40 |
| SLH links, keep in touch and thanks | 17 | 41:50 |
Got so much out of this! Can’t wait to put it into practice.
Teacher
To join our discussion about teaching physics, register in our online forum on Slack. In this forum, we share and discuss ideas and resources for teaching science.
The article The gravity well – a physics analogy explains how to construct and use the gravity well demonstrated in the webinar. It includes an interactive with conceptual simulations that can be demonstrated on a gravity well and links to related Hub content.
Nature of science
In science, a model is a representation of an idea, an object or even a process or a system that is used to describe and explain phenomena that cannot be experienced directly. Models are central to what scientists do, both in their research as well as when communicating their explanations. Learn more about models in science in the article Scientific modelling.
Related content
The Science Learning Hub’s gravity concept has a range of articles and activities focusing on the Physical World, and our teacher PLD Physical World – forces provides an outline of our resources linked to topics such as flight and rockets.
The Science Learning Hub team has curated a collection of resources with a focus on physics. Log in to make this collection part of your private collection. Click on the copy icon, and then you can add additional content and notes and make other changes. Registering an account on the Science Learning Hub is easy and free – sign up with your email address or Google account. Look for the Sign in button at the top of each page.
Useful links
Watch this video as Brian Cox and the team at NASA’s Space Power Facility drop a bowling ball and feathers in a near perfect vacuum.
Visit the Exploratorium website to find your weight on different worlds – and to learn about the relationship between mass, gravity and distance.
