OpenSciEd Unit 6.2 · Lesson 12 · 12.A
Look for: Particles have varying amounts of kinetic energy
From Teacher Edition
Facilitation guidance from the lesson plan — what to notice in student thinking and how to respond while teaching.
Building towards
12.A.2 Analyze and interpret data to mathematically represent the cause-and-effect relationships between the average kinetic energy of the particles of a gas, the temperature of the gas, and the total kinetic energy of all the particles in the gas.
What to look / listen for
- Particles have varying amounts of kinetic energy.
- During particle collisions, energy is transferred from the particles with more kinetic energy to the particles with less kinetic energy.
- Temperature is a measure of the average kinetic energy of the particles in the matter.
- The total energy can increase if more particles are added to a sample, but the average energy can stay the same.
What to do
If students are struggling with the concepts above, project the simulation and have students share their results again. Compare the results and show the outcomes in the simulation in real-time. Ask students to pay close attention to what happens when the particles collide and the data (temperature, total energy) as more particles are added to the sample in the simulation.
Supporting emergent multilinguals
Before students engage in whole class discussions, it can be helpful to first provide them with the opportunity to work with others - either in pairs, triads, or small groups - on ideas related to their reasoning. Prior to this moment, students have been in small groups, but have not articulated their findings across the simulation to others. Consider giving students a moment to briefly share with someone from another group their findings before coming together in a consensus discussion. This can be especially helpful for emerging multilingual students because they offer students another chance to engage in sensemaking with their peers, and also offers them the space to use their linguistic and nonlinguistic resources to express their ideas (and learn from other students’ uses of these resources too).
Universal Design for Learning
Providing scaffolds such as sentence starters and images can support students in expressing observations and findings. Before beginning the discussion, remind students that sentence starters are available on the Communicating in Scientific Ways poster that can help them share their ideas, engage in argumentation, and come to consensus as a class about what we have figured out.