Use this unit to teach your middle school science class about Newton’s Laws of Motion and calculating speed, distance, and time traveled!

Containing seven days’ worth of lessons, this complete unit will save you SO MUCH time and keep your students engaged!

Students will participate in a hands-on lab in which they will measure the time it takes to travel a certain distance and calculate speed. Students will apply this information to Newton’s Three Laws of Motion.

Wonderful resource. This was really engaging and the concepts were really tied together nicely. I liked that it had some differentiation in the calculating problems.

Barbara L.

This unit also touches on potential and kinetic energy. The speed equation is introduced and sample problems are included. Students will also identify variables in the experiment.

Multiple activities are included within this unit.

It includes THREE PowerPoint slideshows (Variables & Fair Tests, Newton’s Laws of Motion, and Calculating Speed, Time, and Distance), a Lab with pull-back cars, lab pages, follow-up pages, calculating speed practice page, CER on how Newton’s Laws relate to pull-back toys and answer keys for everything!

A few additional supplies will be needed to use this resource:

You will need a pull-back car for each group, a tape measure, scale for weighing grams, a stopwatch, car tracks (optional, but the lab will work better), masking tape, and washers or quarters.

Your students will LOVE carrying out investigations using pull-back cars. Your class doesn’t get to play with toys very often!

This was a great resource for teaching calculating speed in a hands-on way! Students loved using toy cars. Thank you for remembering that middle school students need to have fun also!

Chad J.

Other teachers LOVE this resource.

Check out more of the dozens of perfect reviews on Teachers Pay Teachers.

Standards-aligned with NGSS MS-PS2-1 and MS-PS2-2.

With my units, you can be sure you’re covering the information required by the standards!

NGSS MS-PS2-1: Apply Newton’s Third Law to design a solution to a problem involving the motion of two colliding objects. Examples of practical problems could include the impact of collisions between two cars, between a car and stationary objects, and between a meteor and a space vehicle. Assessment is limited to vertical or horizontal interactions in one dimension.

NGSS MS-PS2-2: Plan an investigation to provide evidence that the change in an object’s motion depends on the sum of the forces on the object and the mass of the object. Emphasis is on balanced (Newton’s First Law) and unbalanced forces in a system, qualitative comparisons of forces, mass and changes in motion (Newton’s Second Law), frame of reference, and specification of units. Assessment is limited to forces and changes in motion in one dimension in an inertial reference frame, and to change in one variable at a time. Assessment does not include the use of trigonometry.

Try this unit in your classroom TODAY:

This unit is available for download in two places:

1. Here on teachingscience.us
2. Teaching Science with Lynda R. Williams on Teachers Pay Teachers

Both downloads are identical in every way – if you download directly from this site, you’re giving me the maximum amount of support!

Either way, your satisfaction is 100% guaranteed.

This site uses 100% secure checkout with PayPal, and after checkout, your download is instantly available.

Thank you, and I hope you enjoy using this unit in your classroom!