Alyssa Rollins
I.
LAP #3 Inclined Planes
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.
II.
Learning Goal(s): Describe what specifically students will know and be able to do after the
experience of this class.
a. Students will be able to discuss how an inclined plane works to make life more “simple”.
b. Students will be able to list examples of how inclined planes are used in our everyday life.
c. Students will be able to observe how the properties of an inclined plane change when you
change the slope or the length.
III.
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.
IV.
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.
V.
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.
VI.
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
First 10 min
Next 10 min
Next 10 min
Final 10 min
VII.
Activity
Teacher read-aloud
Discuss vocabulary (force,
slope, accelerate, work, load,
effort, friction)
Give students materials and
worksheet to “play” with and
observe. Students should
document their observations.
Make and discuss model of
inclined plane.
Materials
Inclined plane book
Rulers, yard sticks, marbles,
books, inclined plane model,
worksheet
worksheet
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.
VIII.
Reflection
a. 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
introduction both 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.
b. 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.