8 Units You Can Expect In High School Physics
Teaching a high school physics curriculum at home might seem confusing and intimidating, but it can be broken down into several topics spanning everything from gravitation and energy to nuclear power and electromagnetics.
Explore the eight units you may encounter when teaching physics to your homeschooled students below.
Motion & Forces
In any high school physics curriculum, motion and forces are fundamental concepts for you and your students to come across. As part of this unit, they may learn about:
- The various forces encountered in everyday life
- Representing forces on an object through a free-body diagram
- Calculating the net force on an object by combining individual forces
- Newton’s laws of motion
Force Pairs & Momentum
Students will learn about momentum and its significance in physics. They’ll see how it connects to force, understand the principle of conservation, and explore how the same change in momentum can happen in multiple ways. Students will:
- Apply Newton’s third law in real-world situations
- Understand how force pairs act on different objects
- Explore momentum as the product of mass and velocity
- Recognize the vector nature of momentum
- Explain conservation of momentum as a result of Newton’s third law
- Understand impulse as the change in momentum caused by a net force
- Compare how the same impulse can result from a large force over a short time
Gravitation
Students can expect to go through the topic of gravitation. This concept introduces students to Newton’s law of universal gravitation, which explains the gravitational attraction between any two masses. Students will examine how this law accounts for falling objects on Earth and celestial motion in space. They will also explore:
- The relationship between gravitational force and the masses of objects
- The reason the gravitational force decreases with the square of the distance between objects
- How inertial mass (from Newton’s second law) equals gravitational mass
- The role of centripetal force and its connection to Kepler’s laws of planetary motion
Electrostatics
Coulomb’s law and static electricity are two key themes you might come across in high school physics. Students will take a look at:
- The direct relationship between electrostatic force and the magnitude of charges
- The inverse relationship between force and the square of the distance between objects
- How transferring charged particles creates an imbalance, resulting in a net charge
- How this imbalance produces static electricity
- How polarization allows charged objects to attract neutral ones
Energy
How does energy appear, transfer, and transform? Students will explore the connections between energy and forces, and learn how the law of conservation of energy helps predict system behavior. Topics include:
- Kinetic and potential energy, and how they manifest
- How kinetic energy depends on an object’s motion, speed, and mass
- How potential energy relates to interacting objects in a system
- Energy transfer and transformation
- The relationship between forces and work
- How forces can do positive, negative, or zero work on an object
- Power as the rate of energy change
Electromagnetics
Students will also learn more about electricity and its relationship with magnetism, as well as how it powers our modern world. They’ll also explore:
- Voltage as the electric potential difference between two points
- Electric currents as the net movement of electric charge
- Direct current (DC) and alternating current (AC)
- How voltage provides the push that drives current flow
- How electric currents produce a magnetic field around a conductor
- How arranging a current-carrying wire into loops or a solenoid enhances and shapes the magnetic field
Electromagnetic Radiation
Electromagnetic radiation impacts our everyday lives. Students will learn how EM radiation can range from radio waves to gamma radiation, as well as:
- Discover the similarities and differences among the bands of the electromagnetic (EM) spectrum
- Learn that visible light is just a small part of the EM spectrum
- Understand the wave properties of wavelength, frequency, and speed
- Use these properties to describe EM waves
- Explore wave-like behaviors of EM radiation such as refraction, diffraction, and interference
- Examine how EM radiation shows both wave-like and particle-like properties
- Learn how all objects above absolute zero emit EM radiation based on their temperature
Nuclear Physics
Students will explore the processes of radioactive decay, nuclear fusion, and nuclear fission, and uncover their important real-world applications, as well as:
- Understand how nuclei undergo changes and release energy during radioactive decay
- Learn the key differences between nuclear processes and chemical reactions
- Explore alpha, beta, and gamma decay and their characteristics
- Discover how fusion combines light nuclei to create heavier nuclei
- Learn how fission splits large, unstable nuclei into smaller, more stable fragments
A Concise Physics Curriculum with Faith-Based Teachings
If you plan on teaching high school physics at home, check out Apologia’s curriculum. With faith-based concepts and clear-cut teaching, you can prepare students for college-level science in no time and give them a Biblical foundation in their understanding of science. For more information, check out the details of our live classes or our self-paced courses.
