Teachers' TV lesson plan

Title

Pushing and pulling lesson plan

Associated Teachers’ TV programme

Try This At Home: Pushing and Pulling

Programme description

Ideas on making forces easy to understand for young children

Note to teachers

This lesson plan was not created by Teachers' TV but the author has allowed us to publish it here to be used for educational purposes

Lesson plan for pushing and pulling

Lesson objectives

Understand that things can be moved by pushing and pulling

Assessment

Pupils understand how toys can be made to move

Activity

Introducing the concept

Children sit in circle

Teacher asks what they know about pushing and pulling

Testing the concepts by experiment

Teacher introduces toys and asks how they move; children experiment with the toys, for example by pulling along a wooden duck on a string, pushing a toy car etc. Children describe how the toys are moving

Reinforcing the concepts in small groups

Group 1 – Moves compost by pushing a spade

Group 2 – Moves compost by pushing it in wheelbarrow

Group 3 – Moves compost in trolleys behind bikes by pushing pedals

Group 5 – Moves water with a waterwheel – water pushing wheels

Challenge – How can we move a heavy object (a cameraman and camera in a box)? Roller experiment using bucket and wooden rollers

Incorporating the concepts into EAL support

Group 4 – (With EAL teacher) Plays the clay game – pushing, pulling, squeezing clay to see how this changes its shape

What have we learned so far? Children tell us

Reinforcing the concepts at story time

Pushing and pulling story: The Enormous Watermelon

Children to join in repeating lines

Children act out story

(Project groups present their original design for their recycling monsters. They add the finishing touches to their models and explain how their design incorporates devices to push and pull rubbish for recycling.)

Resources

Variety of push and pull toys

Spades and gloves

Trolleys (boxes and wheels)

Large bucket

Clay and dice

Wooden rollers (or cardboard tubes) for the whole class

‘The Enormous Watermelon’