Forces in the Real-World Lesson Plan (TEKS 6.7A): A Complete 5E Lesson for Contact and Non-Contact Forces

Inside the Forces in the Real-World 5E Lesson

The 5E instructional model walks students through five phases: Engage, Explore, Explain, Elaborate, and Evaluate. It flips the traditional lecture-first sequence on its head. Students explore a concept hands-on before you ever explain it, which means by the time you do explain it, they have something to hook the vocabulary onto.

I switched to the 5E model years ago and stopped going back. Kids retain more, ask better questions, and stop staring at me waiting to be told the answer. The Forces in the Real-World 5E Lesson is built on this framework from start to finish. Here's how it plays out across the five phases.

🎯 Engage

Day one is the classroom force scavenger hunt. Each student (or pair) gets a student sheet with the seven force types listed: friction, normal, applied, tension, gravity, magnetic, and electric. Their job is to walk the room, find a real example of each one, and sketch or describe what they found.

By the end of the period, kids have seven concrete examples in their own handwriting and they can defend why each one fits the category. Nobody has heard a vocabulary lecture yet. That's the point. They walk into the rest of the unit with a working mental model of forces in their actual environment, not a memorized list off a slide.

What's included in the Engage:

• Teacher directions for the force scavenger hunt
• Printable student observation sheet with the seven force types
• Answer key with examples teachers can expect
• Four learning objective slides (standard verbatim, "Identify and describe" highlighted, "I CAN...", and "WE WILL...")
• An illustrated Force and Motion Word Wall in English and Spanish covering the full unit vocabulary

🔬 Explore

The Forces in the Real-World Station Lab is the heart of the Explore phase. Students rotate through 8 stations (plus a 9th challenge station for early finishers) over one class period. The Station Lab is split into four input stations (where kids take in new information) and four output stations (where they show what they learned).

The four input stations:

• 🎬 Watch It! — Students watch a short video on contact and non-contact forces and answer guided questions.
• 📖 Read It! — A one-page reading passage at two differentiated levels, with a Spanish version included.
• 🔬 Explore It! — The hands-on force task (the heart of the Station Lab) where students use magnets, rubber bands, string, and small objects to feel each of the seven forces in action.
• 💻 Research It! — Reference cards with a contact vs. non-contact T-chart, real-world examples, and the unit "N" (Newton).

The four output stations:

• 📋 Organize It! — A card sort where students physically place 12 everyday scenarios under the right force category.
• 🎨 Illustrate It! — Students draw a graphic organizer of contact and non-contact forces with a picture and example for each.
• ✍️ Write It! — Three open-ended questions in complete sentences (this is where you see who really gets it).
• 📝 Assess It! — A short formative check with multiple choice and a fill-in-the-blank vocabulary paragraph.

Print and digital versions are both included. If you want the full breakdown of what happens at every single station, what students produce, and how to set it up, that's in our dedicated Station Lab post.

→ Read the full Forces in the Real-World Station Lab walkthrough 8 stations, materials list, teacher tips

The Station Lab is included in the full 5E lesson. You don't need to buy it separately if you're getting the whole unit.

📚 Explain

Here's the real payoff of doing the Engage and Explore before the Explain: by the time kids hit this phase, they've already hunted down real examples of forces in the classroom and felt them at the Explore It! station. They have a working understanding before you ever start naming things formally. The discussions get deeper, the questions get sharper, and you spend less time defining and more time pushing their thinking.

The Forces in the Real-World Presentation walks 6th graders through the full scope of TEKS 6.7A one concept at a time, with real photographs and force-arrow diagrams on nearly every slide. The deck opens with the big idea (a force is a push or a pull, every force has something doing the pushing or pulling and something receiving it, and forces are measured in Newtons), and then builds out the classification framework: forces split into two big groups based on whether the two objects are touching. From there the deck zooms in on each force one at a time.

Students learn that contact forces happen when two objects are touching. Friction is the force that resists sliding between two surfaces, like a book sliding across a desk or a basketball slowing as it rolls across the gym. Normal force is the push a surface gives back on an object resting on it (the desk pushes up on the book), and the deck pauses to point out that "normal" here means perpendicular, not "regular." Applied force is the push or pull from a person or another object (a student pushing a chair across the room). Tension is the pulling force through a rope, string, cable, or chain when it's stretched taut, like the leash on a dog or the rope in a tug-of-war.

The non-contact half of the unit covers the three forces that act across a distance without the objects touching. Gravity pulls objects with mass toward each other, which is why a dropped ball falls and why the moon orbits Earth. The deck makes a point of clearing up that gravity acts on everything with mass, not just heavy things. Magnetic force pulls or pushes certain materials (mostly iron, nickel, and cobalt) through the space between magnets. The deck includes a built-in sort where students predict which everyday metal objects a magnet will pick up. Electric force acts between charged objects, which is why a rubbed balloon can pull a thin stream of water or stick to a wall. The takeaway: every object students interact with in a day has forces acting on it, and they can name each one.

For every force, students see three model types: a real-world photo, a force-arrow diagram, and a real-world application. That repetition (different forces, same three model types) is what bakes the identify and describe verb of TEKS 6.7A into long-term memory.

What makes the Forces in the Real-World Presentation different from a typical physics slideshow is that kids are doing something on almost every single slide. It's not a lecture deck. It's a participation deck. "Your answer:" prompts appear on most slides, Brain Breaks reset attention every few slides, Quick Action INB tasks (the contact vs. non-contact T-chart sort, a "draw the forces on a book at rest" activity, a magnetic vs. non-magnetic prediction sort) show up throughout, and Think About It prompts push deeper into bigger ideas like "What force lets you walk?" and "Why don't astronauts feel gravity in orbit even though gravity is still acting on them?" The deck closes with a Check for Understanding tied back to the Essential Question: What types of forces act on the everyday objects around me, and how can I identify them?

The Explain materials in this product include:

• An editable 36-slide Presentation at two differentiated levels (Dependent and Modified), works in PowerPoint or Google Slides
• A guided fill-in-the-blank student notes handout that mirrors the Presentation, with answer key
• A Paper Interactive Notebook (English and Spanish) students cut, fold, and glue into their notebooks
• A Digital Interactive Notebook at both levels with answer keys, for 1:1 classrooms or Google Classroom

The Explain runs across two class periods. The built-in Think About It prompts are where the real discussion happens, so let those breathe.

🛠️ Elaborate

The Elaborate phase is where students stretch what they learned about contact and non-contact forces and put it into a project of their choosing. In this 6th grade physics lesson, that's a Student Choice Project board with six different project options plus a "design your own" pathway.

Students might design a comic strip where each panel shows a different force in action, build a small Rube Goldberg machine and label every force at every step, or write a children's book that explains the seven forces using examples from a playground. There are options for kids who love to write, kids who love to draw, kids who love to build, and kids who love to perform. Whatever the project, the point is the same: students apply forces in the real world to a real-world artifact instead of a worksheet.

Choice is the whole point. By letting students pick how they show their thinking, you get more authentic work for TEKS 6.7A and you actually get to see what they understand about contact and non-contact forces.

The rubric (the part teachers actually want)

Every project, no matter which option a student picks, is graded on the same rubric. Five categories at 20 points each:

• Vocabulary (20 pts) — At least four words from the lesson are used in context.
• Concepts (20 pts) — At least two key concepts from the lesson are referenced.
• Presentation (20 pts) — The project grabs attention and is well-organized.
• Clarity (20 pts) — Easy to understand. Free of typos.
• Accuracy (20 pts) — Drawings and force labels are accurate. The science is right.

The rubric uses a minus / check / plus shorthand on every row so you can grade a stack of projects quickly without re-reading every criterion.

Two differentiated versions in one file

The standard version is for students ready for independent application of force concepts. The Reinforcement version is for students who need additional vocabulary or concept support. Three of the six options are swapped for projects with a tighter vocabulary tie-in, and "design your own" is replaced with "collaborate with the teacher" so kids aren't pitching cold.

✅ Evaluate

The Evaluate phase wraps the unit with a formal assessment. It's not all bubble-in. Several questions hand students a labeled scenario with force arrows and ask them to circle the right force and then describe why.

The full assessment has 12 questions across five formats:

• Multiple choice (4 questions) covering the units of force (Newtons), contact vs. non-contact, and identifying forces in everyday examples
• Hotspot / visual (2 questions) where students circle the force-arrow diagram that represents friction (or normal force) and describe the difference between two diagrams
• Multiselect (2 questions) where students pick all the forces acting on a given object
• Short answer (2 questions) on what a force diagram communicates that a written description cannot, and on why gravity still acts on something even when it isn't falling
• Multipart scenario (2 questions) with a 3-student classroom debate where kids identify which reasoning is correct and which force is being described

A modified version is included for students who need additional support. Fewer multiple-choice distractors and sentence-starter scaffolds on the short-answer items.

If you've taught all five phases, this assessment shouldn't surprise anyone. It's a chance for kids to show you they get it.