We made it to Thanksgiving break!

This week we wrapped up conservation of momentum. I’ve been liking doing this before impulse since collisions give us a clear reason to make use of conservation of momentum, but I ended up introducing momentum by just giving students the formula and telling them to calculate it for a bunch of collisions, which worked, but I wasn’t thrilled with. I want to keep thinking about how I could better introduce momentum with this sequence (though in theory I won’t be teaching next year…).

On Monday, I had students work through an activity I’m working on for Pivot Interactives where they switch between thinking in terms of two exploding gliders as a single system and thinking of the gliders as separate systems. I was really pleased with how my students did switching between those two types of thinking after the limited intro to impulse we’ve had. I am wishing we’d spent a bit more time on calculations with momentum before our quiz this week. I usually give students two in-class assessments over every learning target, so I’ll have to make sure we get some more practice before our retake.