A Mystery in Motion

This article describes how two teachers implemented a 5E lesson in a third-grade classroom where the students had been working with forces/motion and investigating things that move like pendulums, swing sets, and various toys. The lesson was included as part of a larger unit on motion. The desired outcome for this lesson was for students to discover and recognize that the motion of various objects could be predicted, graphed, charted, and measured. This collection could then be analyzed for patterns and used to make predictions of the object's future motion. For this particular lesson, the core idea was seen as students were able to see motion represented in a graph through the use of technology. These graphs helped students visualize or model the movement of objects, and students could even use the graphs to predict what forces could be involved if the graph showed movement that was not a recognizable pattern.