Teaching electric circuits can be a lot of fun! Electricity itself is a neat thing. It’s a natural form of energy that humans have been able to use for powering our world. It’s the flow of electrical power from charged particles that originate in an atom.
This topic can get quite complicated, but for middle school students, teaching basic electricity and the basics of how electric circuits work is the way to go!
Why should your students care about this topic? Well, are their cell phones charged? Can they heat up their leftover delicious food for lunch? Can they watch Netflix when they get home? All of this is possible due to electric circuits.
In this post, I will share ideas with you to engage your students in this topic, helping them to be internally motivated to learn as much as they can about circuits. First, I will tell you how you can help students to WONDER and want to learn more about the topic. Then, I will tell you how you can share all of this information with your students without overwhelming them and helping them retain the content. Finally, I will share some ideas with you on how you can widen student knowledge on this topic and help them to apply the information they learned and beyond! This is the WOW Factor!
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“Before” the Lesson on Electric Circuits
Here, I say “before” the lesson, but it really isn’t! Students will be learning from the moment you say circuits, but there are some things that you can do before students get the majority of the content.
In the WOW Factor framework, the first thing that you should do when teaching a topic is to get your students ultra-excited so that they are internally motivated to learn the topic. A lot of students will just comply, pretend to listen, and take notes; however, you want them to WANT to learn and become curious about science. So, how can you do this? I want to teach you how to teach electricity to your students in an awesome way! There are SEVERAL engaging strategies that you can use, but I have two ideas for your electric circuit lesson plan.
Snap Circuits®
You may or may not have these items at your school, but if you are given a budget or can submit a Donor’s Choose project, these are nice to have. There are a lot of options for Snap Circuits®, but for an introduction to electric circuits, something simple will do!
These allow students to explore circuits without knowing the first thing about them. It’s a learning by doing design! There are over 100 projects that students can choose from to actually build electric circuits that do a variety of things. They can create sounds, light things up, make things spin, and more! Everything has to be just right. These are fun circuit lessons!
Your students will absolutely love these and it will make things go a lot smoother when they are taking notes because they will be able to apply the vocabulary to what they explored using these tools.
If you have never heard of Snap Circuits®, here is a video that explains a bit!
PhET Simulation
I know that not every school and teacher has the funds for kits such as those; however, there are some AWESOME online tools that can help students explore the same concepts. This Circuit Construction Kit DC – Intro is great for middle school students. There are many things that students can use to create and explore circuits. They can create their own electric circuit diagram examples without even knowing it!
They can choose from wire, battery, light bulb, resistor, switch, fuse, dollar bill, paper clip, coin, eraser, pencil, hand, and dog.
This is a great way for students to explore what can connect together to create an electrical current. It’s ok if they do not have a lot of prior knowledge or if they do not have any clue what these new vocabulary terms are. This is purely for discovery, exploring, and wondering.
There are also tools to measure current and voltage. In addition, students can explore electrical symbols!
Not Your Average Electric Circuits Lecture Notes
At this point, your students are probably on edge wondering either how make an electric circuit, wondering how complicated this really gets, or just want to know more about this topic in general.
Your job as a teacher is to lead them to the information that they need, but make sure that you don’t overwhelm them in the process. If students are given too much information at one time, they will end up not learning anything at all. They’ll tune out. Hmmmm…how to teach circuits?!
So, this is where interactive lessons are here to help you and your students. They are specifically designed to help reduce student cognitive load and break content into chunks. After each chunk, students have the opportunity to process and practice that bit of information before moving on. They process through different embedded activities such as graphic organizers, drag-and-drop questions, critical thinking questions, exploring outside resources, and more!
This particular Electric Circuits Interactive Lesson covers all of the topics that middle school science students need such as electricity, protons, neutrons, electrons, electric currents, AC and DC, electric circuit components, open and closed circuits, series and parallel circuits, and more!
Some of the interactive activities that are included are “Will the lightbulb light?”, create your own circuit, drag the circle to answer, and more.
You can learn more here, and you can also find this electric circuits lesson on TPT.
Teaching Electric Circuits – Widen Knowledge
How do electric circuits work? Now it’s time for your students to shine and share what they have learned! After your students have explored and learned about circuits, they should be given the opportunity to expand upon this and widen their knowledge! Here are two fun ideas!
Build a Game
This is a fun activity to let your students creativity shine and show off what they have learned about electric circuits, electricity, energy transfer, conductors and insulators, and “insert science topic here”. There are so many pieces of science content that they can bring into this game. It can even be a game about how to learn electrical circuits!
So, what do they do? Their goal should be to build a board game, or any other type of game, that runs on electricity.
What do they need:
- light source
- battery (6V)
- hole puncher
- masking tape
- aluminum foil
- scissors
- cardstock or cardboard (for game board)
Allow your students to work in groups and see what creative things they come up with!
Human Circuit
Don’t have time for a project? I got you! Here’s an easy activity that you can have your students do as a class. Give your students the task to create different circuits using themselves! Their goal should be to work together as a class (everyone) to model an electric circuit.
First, you’ll need to take your students outside or move your desks to the side so that you have enough room for all of your students.
Then, you’ll give them a variety of tasks. It’s up to you, but here are some ideas!
- Assign 1 student as the power source, another student as the load, and then the rest of the students are the electrical conductor. Once this is done, see if they can model a simple circuit!
- Assign 1 student as the power source, another student as the load, another student as an on-switch, and then the rest of the students are the electrical conductor. Once this is done, see if they can model a simple circuit!
- Do the same things as example #2, but tell the student to be the off-switch.
- Assign 1 student as the power source, another student as the load, and then the rest of the students are the electrical conductor. Once this is done, see if they can model an open circuit.
- Assign 1 student as the power source, another student as the load, and then the rest of the students are the electrical conductor. Once this is done, see if they can model a closed circuit.
- Assign more students as loads. Once this is done, see if they can model a parallel circuit.
- Assign more students as loads. Once this is done, see if they can model a series circuit.
You can also have signs that say load, switch, electrical conductor, etc. to make this more visual.
This could be a simple or as complicated as you’d like it to be! Have fun!
Bonus: Electric Circuit Review Activity
In this activity, you can print out 20 questions (gallery walk style or task cards style) and post them around the room or in stations.
You can also give students the answer sheet provided.
Students can walk around the room or around their stations to answer the questions. There are a variety of questions like true/false, fill in the blank, draw a circuit, multiple choice, etc.
It’s a great way for students to get up out of their seats and moving to review the standards on electric circuits!
This resource comes with a digital and print version!
Help your students master science content!
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