Newton's 1st and 3rd laws (AQA GCSE FT)

This lesson describes Newton’s 1st and 3rd laws of motion and challenges students to apply their understanding to different situations. The PowerPoint and accompanying resources have been primarily designed to cover points 5.4.2.1 and 5.4.2.3 of the AQA GCSE Physics and Combined Science specifications, but also begins to cover resultant forces. This lesson has been specifically written for those students who will take the foundation tier.

The lesson begins with a prior knowledge check, where the students must use their existing knowledge to recall the units for resistance, energy and force. This leads into a brief description of Isaac Newton and his relevance for topic P5. Students will learn about resultant forces in greater detail in the next lesson, but it is introduced here to allow them to understand how a resultant force of ON is related to Newton’s 1st law. A series of exam-style questions are used to challenge the students to apply their understanding of this law and all answers are embedded into the PowerPoint to allow them to check their progress.

Moving forwards, the example of a teacher sitting on a chair is shown to describe Newton’s 3rd law before they are asked to apply their understanding.

The lesson is full of key points and active modelling is used to support the students to understand how to tackle a concept.

As described above, this lesson has been written for foundation tier students and is expected to be covered in a lesson ranging between 45 minutes and an hour. It is the 3rd lesson in a series of 15 lessons which have been planned to cover the main content of topic P5.