Motion & Design Unit – Grade 5

Nov 12, 2016

This curriculum references lessons found in the STC Motion & Design kit. This guide reframes this physics kit around an event of a skateboarder who experiences a “successful” jump and an “epic fail” jump. To explain this phenomenon, students gather evidence about force, motion, speed, balanced/unbalanced forces, and transfer of energy to develop an explanation around how and why this phenomenon occurs.

Lessons from this kit focus on using a cart and weights. These explorations can help students connect to the skateboarder phenomenon around issues of speed, stopping forces, starting forces, weight, gravity, friction, etc. There are many experiences students bring up during this unit which are rich for productive conversations. For example, riding bicycles, skating, being on a school bus, being in a loaded down car vs empty car, etc. and many other references they share from things they’ve seen, read about, or experienced. Feel free to adjust or add in additional lessons based in students’ experiences. The science ideas captured in this unit can be explored through many different contexts.

This draft is a starting place. Please feel free to make changes to the student tools within this file and to add or change activities based on the ideas your students bring up in class.

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5th Motion & Design Curriculum Revisions - August 2015
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In this video we illustrate what Ambitious Teaching looks like in classrooms ranging from high school to kindergarten. The practices were developed through collaborations between teachers and researchers, and they are continually evolving as we learn more about how they work with young learners. There are several themes that you’ll see in all examples, such as a focus on puzzling and complex phenomena, opportunities to make sense through talk, making thinking visible, attending to who is participating, using various forms of scaffolding and tools, and much more.

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