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    Motion and Stability: Forces and Interactions

Students who demonstrate understanding can:

Performance Expectations

  1. Conduct an investigation and evaluate the experimental design to provide evidence that fields exist between objects exerting forces on each other even though the objects are not in contact. MS-PS2-5

    Clarification Statement and Assessment Boundary

A Peformance Expectation (PE) is what a student should be able to do to show mastery of a concept. Some PEs include a Clarification Statement and/or an Assessment Boundary. These can be found by clicking the PE for "More Info." By hovering over a PE, its corresponding pieces from the Science and Engineering Practices, Disciplinary Core Ideas, and Crosscutting Concepts will be highlighted.

Science and Engineering Practices

Disciplinary Core Ideas

Crosscutting Concepts

By clicking on a specific Science and Engineering Practice, Disciplinary Core Idea, or Crosscutting Concept, you can find out more information on it. By hovering over one you can find its corresponding elements in the PEs.

Planning Curriculum

Common Core State Standards Connections

ELA/Literacy

  • RST.6-8.3 - Follow precisely a multistep procedure when carrying out experiments, taking measurements, or performing technical tasks. (MS-PS2-5)
  • WHST.6-8.7 - Conduct short research projects to answer a question (including a self-generated question), drawing on several sources and generating additional related, focused questions that allow for multiple avenues of exploration. (MS-PS2-5)

Model Course Mapping

First Time Visitors

Resources & Lesson Plans

  • More resources added each week!
    A team of teacher curators is working to find, review, and vet online resources that support the standards. Check back often, as NSTA continues to add more targeted resources.
  • Weight in an Elevator (Phenomenon)

    A boy rides up an elevator in a tall building (the World Trade Center), with a scale under his arm.  Upon reaching the top, he stands on the scale and watches what happens to his weight as he rides down.  NOTE: For this phenomenon, start th ...

  • Levitation Engineers

    Students will experiment with magnets to identify magnetic properties and the differences between contact and non-contact forces.  They will use their discoveries, based on the results of their experiments, to design and build a "levitating ...

  • Build a Charge Detector

    Students investigate the transfer of electric charge and electric force by building and using electroscopes.  They use the electroscopes they built, to make qualitative observations about the static electric charge between pairs of objects. &nbs ...

  • Floating Static Bands

    The resource describes five short activities involving static electricity attraction and repulsion, then offers suggestions for students to alter activities by changing one suggested variable at a time, in order to design and try their own investigat ...

  • Inspector Detector Challenge

    Students use the engineering design process to design and build magnetic-field detectors, and use them to find hidden magnets. Parallels are drawn to real-world NASA missions and how NASA scientists use magnetic field data from planets and moons. ...

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  •  Legends of Learning - Force Fields

    In this series of games, your students will learn about electric, magnetic, and gravitational fields and their visual representations. The Force Fields learning objective delivers improved student engagement and academic performance in your classroom...

Planning Curriculum gives connections to other areas of study for easier curriculum creation.