Unit 9 - THE LAW OF GRAVITY - NGSS Aligned PHYSICS for THE MIDDLE GRADES

Unit 9 of Common Core and NGSS Aligned PHYSICS for THE MIDDLE GRADES (6-8): Volume Two - Basic Physical Science includes four comprehensive 40-50 minutes lessons on THE LAW OF GRAVITY. In addition to an instructive and visually engaging lesson-by-lesson powerpoint presentation, every activity comes complete with student worksheets, a teacher preparation and lesson implementation guide, quizzes, and a unit review test with answers. These fun multimodal activities are designed to keep students engaged and thinking, focussed on practicing, and ready to retrieve what they have learned from this basic introduction to Sir Isaac’s Newton’s law of universal gravitation.

During the course of instruction, students will learn to (1) create a procedure for finding the center of gravity of an oddly shaped object, (2) design and perform an experiment to show that objects of varying shapes and masses accelerate toward earth at the same rate, (3) derive a formula that relates the force of gravity between two objects to their masses and the distance between them, and (4) calculate the weight of objects near the surface of a large massive object such as a moon or planet. In addition, advanced students will learn how 19th Century scientists measured the mass of Planet Earth using Newton’s law and a bit of clever algebra.