Alyssa RollinsLAP #3 Inclined Planes

  1. Content: Describe what it is you will teach. What is the content?

This lesson will focus on inclined planes. We will learn about force, slope, acceleration, work, load, and effort and how they relate to inclined planes. Students will relate these concepts to their everyday lives.

  1. Learning Goal(s): Describe what specifically students will know and be able to do after the experience of this class.
  1. Students will be able to discuss how an inclined plane works to make life more “simple”.
  2. Students will be able to list examples of how inclined planes are used in our everyday life.
  3. Students will be able to observe how the properties of an inclined plane change when you change the slope or the length.
  1. Rationale: Explain how the content and learning goal(s) relate to your Curriculum Unit Plan learning goals.

This unit looks at simple machines and how they work to make lives simpler. This lesson does that by focusing on one of these machines, the inclined plane. Students will analyze this simple machine as they will all of the others, by experimenting. Students will also look at the connection to everyday life and learn the specific components of the inclined plane.

  1. Assessment: Describe how you and your students will know they have reached your learning goals.

Students will label a diagram of an inclined plane and label the components. They will also document their thought process as they experiment with inclined planes. Both of these items will tell me whether or not students understand.

  1. Personalization: Describe how you will provide for individual student strengths and needs. How will you and your lesson consider the needs of each student and scaffold learning?

There are both a hands on and concrete learning experiences in this lesson. I will read a book on inclined planes and students will have a chance to “play” with inclined planes for themselves and discover the properties. This should help all learners access the material.

  1. Activity description and agenda: Describe the activities that will help your students understand the content of your class lesson by creating an agenda with time frames for your class. Be prepared to explain why you think each activity will help students on the path toward understanding.

I will do a read aloud activity and go over the important vocabulary words with the students. Then I will give them materials to make an inclined plane and give them time to play with it and discuss what they notice. Then we will come together as a class and discuss what we’ve observed. We will chart our findings.

Time / Activity / Materials
First 10 min / Teacher read-aloud / Inclined plane book
Next 10 min / Discuss vocabulary (force, slope, accelerate, work, load, effort, friction)
Next 10 min / Give students materials and worksheet to “play” with and observe. Students should document their observations. / Rulers, yard sticks, marbles, books, inclined plane model, worksheet
Final 10 min / Make and discuss model of inclined plane. / worksheet
  1. List the Massachusetts Learning Standards this lesson addresses.

2.1 Identify tools and simple machines used for a specific purpose, e.g., ramp, wheel,

pulley, lever.

  1. Reflection
  1. In light of all areas of planning, but especially in terms of your stated purpose and learning goals, in what ways was the activity(ies) successful? How do you know? In what ways was it not successful? How might the activity be planned differently another time?

This was the lesson that I taught to my peers and I got some helpful feedback before I attempted it in the classroom. I found that my students were excited to be able to work independently and experiment with the inclined planes. They were that much more interested in the material and vocabulary when they had a chance to “play” with actual inclined planes and talk about what they saw (observed) after they had been introduced to the concept. This activity was successful because students were able to use vocabulary and concepts that we had learned in the introductionboth during the experiment and in their responses on the worksheet. For example, Nazir wrote in response to rolling the marble down the inclined plane “ I notice the steeper the ramp so the marble went fast” which I interpret to mean “the steeper the ramp the faster the marble rolls”. This shows that he understood that slope or steepness have an effect on the marble. He also says in response to pulling the load up the ramp that “it’s difficult because the steep board, since it’s steep it will go a little bit slow.” This shows me that he understands that the amount of effort used is dependent on the steepness, or slope, of the inclined plane. Another student, Dakota, hypothesized that in the second trial it will be more difficult to lift the load. She found that “it needed more muscle the second time” to move the load. Many other students were also able to explain using words like steepness, distance, force and effort to back up their observations.

It seems clear that having a word bank and doing a short reading before completing the activity helped students focus their observations and use appropriate language to document those observations. They also had some background knowledge because they had done a discovery of all of the simple machines in the first lesson. I thought that my students were well prepared to complete the learning activity and assessment.

In the future I might change the structure of the activity so that students do one step at a time rather than all at once. When I was teaching it I modeled everything so that students knew what to do for each step, and they did pretty well with all of it. I just worry that it was a lot at once and the room was a little chaotic. I had no way to know what step all of the students were at or if they were properly documenting what they noticed. If I were to do one step at a time I could be sure that every student completed all parts of the worksheet and knew what the expectations were.

  1. What did you learn from the experience of this lesson that will inform your next LAP?

For my next LAP I think I will do a whole class review of inclined planes before we begin pulleys. I will also do a table by table demonstration of a pulley, rather than an independent learning activity. I feel that this is important because I will have more involvement in their individual learning and can clear up any misconceptions. I will also do a more informal observation assessment to give students more freedom to discover why pulleys are important in the real world. I also won’t have as much time to devote to the next lesson as I did to this one so I want to be sure that students are able to get the same learning out of it as they did in this lesson.