Forces Teaching Resources

Teach students about types of force and how they make objects move with forces worksheets, science games, activities and more teacher resources.

Stocked with printables and digital activities that are NGSS curriculum-aligned, this resource collection has been created to save you time on lesson planning. Explore our teacher-created resources to find everything you need to teach about balanced and unbalanced forces, the effects of gravity and magnetism and more core physics concepts to meet your state standards.

Whether you're new to teaching this section of elementary science or your'e looking for fresh ways to engage your students, our teacher team has you covered. Read on for a definition of force for kids and a look at the different types of forces with kid-friendly ways to explain them all.

What Is Force in Science? A Kid-Friendly Definition

We've all experienced force — whether we knew it by name or not. But how do you explain what forces are to your students? Let's start with a kid-friendly forces definition that you can use in your science lessons.

Force is something that causes an object to move, stop moving or change direction or causes an object to change its shape or size.

Let's say the window of the classroom is open, and a gust of wind blows in, blowing a piece of paper off of your desk. That is an example of a force at work!

The gust of wind interacted with the piece of paper, and the force of the wind caused the paper to move.

2 Types of Forces Explained for Kids

There are two main types of forces found in nature — contact forces and non-contact forces.

Contact Forces

Contact forces are a type of force that involves direct contact between two things or objects.

This type of force is responsible for many of real-world examples that your students have likely experienced such as the force of a friend making a swing move by pushing it or the force that a child has to exert to push a bicycle across the grass.

The example described above, in which a piece of paper was moved by the force of the wind, is a prime example of contact forces.

Non-Contact Forces

If contact forces involve direct contact, it's no surprise that non-contact forces are the very opposite. These forces can make objects move or change even from a distance.

Some common examples of non-contact forces include magnetism and gravity.

What Are Balanced and Unbalanced Forces?

We've also found it can be helpful to keep an explanation of balanced and unbalanced forces at hand when you're teaching your forces unit!

Tied directly to Newton's Law of Motion, these two concepts help explain how a force will affect an object's motion.

• Balanced Forces — When an object is subject to balanced forces, it will remain at rest if it was initially at rest. If it was already in motion, it will continue moving at a constant velocity.
• Unbalanced Forces — If an object is acted upon by unbalanced forces, on the other hand, the object experiences a net force in a particular direction. Due to this imbalance, the object will accelerate in the direction of the net force.
  • If the unbalanced force is in the same direction as the object's initial motion, the object to speed up. If the unbalanced force is in the opposite direction, the opposite will happen. It will cause the object to slow down.