Explaining Electricity: Student Exercises and Teachers Guide

Electricity can be easy to understand - if you choose the right starting point!

To make the science of electricity intuitive, you will begin with energy. From here, you can learn a fruitful model of simple electric circuits, developed from ground up.

This approach is highly pictorial: you will represent electric potential (Volts) and electric current (Amps) with simple diagrams. Then you can use these diagrams to analyze electric circuits. When the time comes to introduce algebra and equations, you will already have know something about V, I, R and P from your diagrams.

Parents and teachers, you get one half of the book! We provide solid pedagogical supports, recipes, and methods of presentation.Every Student Exercise has a corresponding Parent-Teacher Guide - to help you teach your own child about electricity. Using pencil-and-paper exercises, your student will develop a fruitful model of simple electric circuits. Every exercise uses meaningful and powerful diagrams that work the way that kids actually think.

Because this unit involves fundamental forces and concepts, it is placed first in the series of four strands. It should be taught before chemistry.

The Electricity unit is subdivided into four sections, approximately one week each.

1. Static electricity and the electrical structure of matter
2. Characteristics of electric current, and development of a model of current, potential, resistance and power
3. Mathematical treatment of series and parallel circuits
4. Projects that are either an application of the model or an extensions of the model.

At the end of sections 1 - 3 is a thorough quiz

Jim Ross has more than 34 years experience in science education, both in private and public school systems. For six years he was the Coordinator of Investigative Studies at Nicholson Catholic College, Belleville, ON, where his portfolio included science, math, history, geography, and the social sciences. In 1988, Jim Ross and Mike Lattner founded Ross Lattner Educational Consultants, a small, independent publishing company, to meet the need for high quality curriculum materials in the de-streamed common curriculum. Ross Lattner continues to publish innovative instructional strategies. Jim's M.Ed. thesis, The Graininess of Everyday Thinking, examined the cognitive structure of students' everyday language, and how it is related to students' natural reasoning about physical phenomena. From 2001-2005, Jim taught the pedagogy courses in Chemistry, Physics and Intermediate Science at the Faculty of Education at the University of Western Ontario. In that capacity, he was awarded the honour of Teacher of the Year by the the Faculty of Ed. Jim has served as president of the Ontario Association of Physics Teachers, and has been an active member of STAO. He has contributed to the writing of the Ontario senior physics curriculum documents. Entering an active retirement in 2008, Jim contributed to McGraw-Hill Ryerson's Grade 9 and 10 "ON Science" texts. As he continues to study and write, he has been constructing the new approach to chemistry learning and teaching with Edvantage Press, and is an active member of the Edvantage Chemistry Interactive online community.