Middle School, Physics Lesson Plans (25 results)
Physics is the study of matter — what is it made of? How does it behave? What laws or equations describe it? From subatomic particles, to the Big Bang, modern physicists study matter at a tremendous range of scales. There's a whole lot of interesting physics at the human scale, too.
Select a resource
Sort by
|
Lesson Plan
Grade: 6th-8th
1 review
What goes up, must come down in this thrill-seeking lesson plan! How much energy does a roller coaster car need to make it through a loop? In this lesson your students will learn about kinetic and potential energy as they build their own roller coasters from simple classroom materials.
NGSS Performance Expectations:
Lesson Plan
Grade: 6th-8th
Learn about real space flight and Newton's laws of motion with this fun lesson! This new twist on a classic project lets your students build a multi-stage balloon rocket that they can launch across the classroom.
NGSS Performance Expectations:
Lesson Plan
Grade: 6th-8th
When light interacts with an object, it can be absorbed, transmitted, or reflected. This lesson focuses on materials that reflect light. Specifically, students will use mirrors and flashlights to investigate how light is reflected from a surface. By doing that, they will discover that when a light ray hits a reflective surface, its angle of incidence is equal to the angle of reflection, which is stated by the law of reflection. Students will then use their gained knowledge in a mirror maze…
NGSS Performance Expectations:
Lesson Plan
Grade: 6th-8th
Aircraft carriers are much shorter than a typical airport runway. How do airplanes manage to gain enough speed for takeoff over such a short distance? A catapult gives them an extra boost! In this lesson, your students will practice engineering design as they build their own paper airplane launchers, while learning about kinetic and potential energy.
NGSS Performance Expectations:
Lesson Plan
Grade: 6th-8th
Combine Newton's third law of motion with engineering design in one fun lesson! Your students will learn about equal and opposite reaction forces as they design and build a bumper to protect a toy car during a crash.
NGSS Performance Expectations:
Lesson Plan
Grade: 6th-8th
In this lesson plan, your students will build their own recycling sorting machines that use various methods, like magnets or puffs of air, to separate shreds of paper from paper clips. This lesson is inspired by the real-world engineering challenge of separating various materials, like paper, plastic, and metals, that get combined in single-stream recycling programs.
NGSS Performance Expectations:
Lesson Plan
Grade: 6th-8th
Don't just teach your students about Newton's laws of motion using diagrams in a textbook—try something hands-on! In this project, students will build their own cars using craft materials and explore the relationship between force, mass, and acceleration. Students can graph data and make observations in real-time using a mobile phone and a sensor app or use a low-tech approach with a meter stick and stopwatch.
NGSS Performance Expectations:
Lesson Plan
Grade: 6th-8th
Rube Goldberg machines—machines that complete a simple task in a convoluted way—are intriguing, artistic, and fun! In this lesson, students will design and build such a machine themselves and use the concept of kinetic energy in the process. Before students start designing, they will do an experiment that explores how kinetic energy depends on the mass and the speed of the moving object. With a clear understanding of this concept, students then tackle the engineering design…
NGSS Performance Expectations:
Lesson Plan
Grade: 6th-8th
Add a twist to a classic activity with this fun lesson plan. Your students will design and build a ball run for a ping pong ball using nothing but paper and tape. Their goal is to make the slowest ball run possible. How long can they make it take for the ball to go through their ball run? The 2022 competition is over, but you can see what students built and learn about the winners on the 2022 Fluor Engineering Challenge summary page. Teachers, note that
elementary
and
high…
NGSS Performance Expectations:
Lesson Plan
Grade: 6th-8th
Why can we feel gravity pull us down towards the Earth, but not sideways towards other big objects like buildings? Why do the planets in our solar system orbit the sun instead of flying off into space? In this lesson plan your students will develop a model for gravity and use it to explore answers to these questions.
NGSS Performance Expectations:
|
Explore Our Science Videos
How to Make Edible Rice Paper
Race Through Space with Gravity Assist Maneuvers
Measure Static Electricity With An Electroscope!