This resource accompanies our Rethink 5th Grade Science course. It includes ideas for use, ways to support exceptional children, ways to extend learning, digital resources and tools, tips for supporting English Language Learners and students with visual and hearing impairments. There are also ideas for offline learning. 

This lesson combines the science standards for force and motion with an engineering activity. Students will design a car from cardboard straws. Coffee stirs tape, balloon, and bottle lids. ( students can choose which types of wheels). Students will race the cars with classmates to determine which is the fastest.

This video clip is meant to serve as a writing or discussion prompt during a unit on forces and motion. This can be used at varied grade levels, with the expectation that student responses would be more complex in higher grade levels.

This brief video clip demonstrates how to create a hovercraft from simple materials. Toward the end of the clip, the students in the video explains the science behind the hovercraft's motion (reduced friction). Students are encouraged to continue the experimentation on their own by changing variables in the design of the hovercraft.

Students design and build a balloon-powered car to better understand the science ideas related to rocket propulsion. They use ideas of mass and force to work out ways to improve the distance traveled by the car.

In this lesson, students will learn that forces can change the speed or direction of motion. Students will observe what happens to a toy car as it moves down a ramp and then encounters "speed bumps" that are added at different lengths away from the ramp. Students will also add a clay figure to the top of the cars to see what effect the ramp and "speed bumps" will have on the figure.

Students will be able to:make and document scientific observations in order to compare the effects of different materials on an object's movement using Sphero Bolt coding robots. 

Dancing Dash!
Create a dance for Dash to do along with students to demonstrate mastery of Math (addition/subtraction) and Science (motion/force).

This resource is a compilation of text, videos, and other elements to create a scaffolded 5E learning experience for students. In this lesson, students explore how forces affect motion and design their own experiment to test the effects of force.

This is a 5th grade unit for Science.  This unit helps students develop their understanding of force, motion, and the relationship between them as well as how factors such as gravity, friction, and change in mass affect the motion of objects. 

On this interactive webpage, students read a short article about the effect that incline has on the force of gravity. Learners are asked to look at pictures of inclines of varying degrees and answer questions about how the incline affects the pull of gravity on an object going up or down.

Students work in groups of 2 to create an anchor out of a collection of materials provided by the teacher. Students will test their anchors in an aquarium periodically to determine if their anchor has too much surface area, thus making it buoyant, or if the materials are combined in a way that is denser than the water causing the anchor to sink. The ultimate goal is to balance the forces being applied to the boat.  The anchor is attached to a 3d printed boat, or a boat of the teacher's choosing. A fan is directed at the boat after the anchor has been attached and dropped in the water. In addition to the wind, the teacher will create waves by tapping the side of the tank. Students will observe if the anchor holds under these circumstances or not. Ultimately, they will try to prevent the boat from moving at all. Distance traveled for each test will be taken by a meter stick or tape measure fixed to the side of the tank. Students will strive to keep the boat frozen at 0 centimeters.

This lesson is the first of a two-part series on the science of hurricanes and the kinds of technology being used to identify and track them. In this activity students examine different scientific aspects of hurricanes, all in an effort to begin to understand the nature of motion?particularly how changes in speed or direction of motion are caused by forces.

In this lesson, students will work in small groups to experience friction in action as they investigate the movement of toy cars. Students use the scientific process to hypothesize and then test how toy cars travel down ramps using differing variables such as mass and types of materials. They also review and share their results with the class.

In this lesson, students investigate how the surface and angle of a slope affects the distance a toy car will travel down a ramp.

In this activity, students will make go-carts and measure the speed, then change different factors of the experiment and see how the speed changes. In day 1, students will design and build a cart based on a specified set of materials, and then complete several trials to test the cart by rolling it down a ramp. Through discussion and journaling students will share their designs and compare the speeds of carts. In day 2, students will experiment with ways to increase or decrease the speed of their cart.

This is the educator's guide for a set of activities that teach students about humans' endeavors to return to the moon. The emphasis is for students to understand that engineers must "imagine and plan" before they begin to build and experiment. Each activity features objectives, a list of materials, educator information, procedures, and student worksheets. Students should work in teams to complete the activities. Note: Activities do not align to all objectives that are listed; specific activities align to specific objectives.

Students will be grouped into teams. Then each team will create a pathway for their Hexbug to travel. The Hexbug path should be 5 feet from beginning to end and must include two curves, a hill, one bridge and one tunnel. The Hexbug must travel from the beginning to the end without any assistance. Each team will have a timer and will have 20 minutes to design the quickest path they can for their Hexbug.  After the first race teams will have 5 minutes to talk about changes they can make and 5 minutes to make the changes. There will be one final race to see if a different team is able to win.

In this lesson, students will observe and record the amount of work done by marbles rolling down a plane and more fully understand the relationship between potential and kinetic energy.

In this lesson, students will predict which will land first, a marble or a pea, when dropped from the same height. Students will then participate in a class discussion. Next, students work in small groups to design an experiment to test their ideas about the effect the height of a ramp will have on how far an object will travel. Students will record the data from their investigations and present their results to the class, also participating in a culminating class discussion. A student recording sheet is included.