Changing Circuits

This Year 6 Electricity 'Changing Circuits' planning pack contains six ready-to-teach Year 6 Electricity lessons to consolidate your class's knowledge of circuits and how they work, before challenging them to extend their knowledge of electrical circuits through a variety of fun, practical and informative activities.

Investigate anomalous results, bulb brightness and how the thickness and length of a wire can affect how a circuit works.

Each of the six lessons in this Year 6 Electricity scheme comes with a detailed lesson plan, PDF lesson slides and printable resources to support your class's learning. All you need are the circuit components!

Investigating Electricity

Recap your class's knowledge and understanding of electricity from their work in Year 4. Discuss different electrical vocabulary as well as what electricity is, delving deeper than they did previously.

Introduce the idea of static electricity with your class and use the included lesson slides to explain how it happens and the effects that it can have on different objects.

The differentiated activity ideas challenge children to answer questions about electricity, or conduct investigations around static electricity, recording their observations.

Recapping Circuits

This lesson recaps your class's knowledge and understanding of how a circuit works and how they can be built. The children will create and experiment with different circuits and components, figuring out problems they come across along the way.

The lesson comes with lesson input slides and a lesson plan, along with the printable resources to support your class in their independent activities.

Circuit Symbols

In this lesson the children will begin to link circuit components to the relevant symbols that are used in circuit diagrams. The class will discuss why we use different symbols and practise reading diagrams and creating the circuits that are depicted.

This lesson comes with a detailed lesson plan, lesson input slides and accompanying printable resources to support your class in their independent activities.

Bulb Brightness

In this Year 6 Electricity lesson your class will investigate how the brightness of a bulb can be changed and affected by the amount of voltage in the circuit. Using their previous learning about symbols, the children will draw and discuss different circuits and which would be the brightest bulbs.

The children will discuss how the number of batteries, or other components will affect how they work, including when the components are overpowered and can break when there's too high a voltage for them.

The lesson comes with lesson input slides and a lesson plan, along with the printable resources to support your class in their independent activities.

Wire Investigation

After investigating how the number of batteries and bulbs in a circuit affect bulb brightness, your class will plan and conduct an investigation to see how different wires can affect the brightness of a bulb. The children will look at improving an existing investigation as well as discussing anomalous results in experiments and how we can spot them.

An alternative activity can be used to test your class's understanding of how to read results tables and answer questions about their conclusions. A great activity if you're lacking the physical resources for this investigation.

This lesson comes with all the printable resources to support your children as they conduct their experiments, as well as a detailed lesson plan, PDF lesson slides and differentiated activity ideas.

Making a device

Test out your Year 6 Electricity knowledge as they create their own burglar alarm or other device using their understanding of circuits and their components. This is a great lesson to round off your topic on Changing Circuits.

This lesson comes with a detailed lesson plan, lesson input slides and accompanying printable resources, including instructions on how to make their own burglar alarm.