Forces for Class 1 to 3: Push, Pull, Gravity and Friction

Science at this age has one rule: the feeling comes before the word. A child who has pulled a door open and pushed a toy car understands force. A child who has been told "a force is a push or a pull" and asked to write it down has learned a sentence.

The ladder

• Class 1: pushes and pulls, found in the room. Push and Pull Forces, free, and read aloud.
• Class 2: what a force does. It changes movement (start, stop, faster, slower, turn) or shape (squash, stretch, bend, twist). Forces, Movement and Shape.
• Class 3: two forces with names. Gravity pulls everything down. Friction slows things that rub. Forces, Gravity and Friction.

The misconception that lasts

Roll a ball along the floor and it stops. Ask why and almost every child, and a fair number of adults, will say it ran out of push. It did not. Nothing runs out of push. It stopped because the floor rubbed against it, and that rubbing is friction. On ice it would go much further, and in space it would never stop at all.

This is worth getting right in Class 3 because it comes back, in Class 9 physics, as Newton's first law, and a child who still believes things stop on their own will find that law incomprehensible. Named early, it is a fact. Named late, it is an argument with intuition.

Why every example is a thing to do

The lessons use a door, a sponge, a ball and a book because the child has all four. A diagram of a force is an arrow, and an arrow is an abstraction; a sponge in the hand is not. Class 1 and 2 are read aloud so a child who cannot yet read the word "friction" can still learn what it does.

The quiz

Each lesson ends on a quiz with pictures: which one is a push, which one is a pull, what will happen when the ball reaches the carpet. Answers appear at the end with the reason for each. Fifty per cent or better earns credits for the games, which for this age include a maze and a shape sorter that are, unannounced, more forces practice.