New Hampshire Physics: Planning a Unit to the Standards

Quick answer: Plan backward from the evidence. Decide which New Hampshire College and Career Ready Standards a unit will cover, write down the two or three pieces of student work that will prove each one, then build lessons toward those. Where competency statements sit beside standards on the report card, a unit without named evidence is hard to defend in June.

What does a physics unit have to produce in a New Hampshire school?

Most New Hampshire high schools describe learning in competencies, so physics teachers translate between two vocabularies: the New Hampshire College and Career Ready Standards on one side, a local competency statement on the other. Do that translation once, in writing, at the top of the unit plan. Every reassessment conversation afterward refers back to the same sentence.

Districts working under the Performance Assessment for Competency Education model lean harder still on locally designed tasks, so the quality of your performance task is the quality of your evidence. Build one per unit that a student could redo in a different context, mark it against the competency wording, and keep the rubric stable so two teachers grade the same work the same way.

What order should the topics run in?

Forces and simple machines belong at the front, because they are the only topics where students can see the quantity they are measuring. A pulley system that halves the effort is arguable in a way a circuit diagram is not, and the argument is what makes the mathematics stick. Push mechanics forward and energy follows without a fight in January.

Physics Escape Room – Lever Law & Pulley Systems works as that opening because it runs as a problem students solve rather than a chapter they read, and the recorded answers give you a first piece of evidence within two weeks. Everything else for your grade band is listed on the New Hampshire Teaching Resources & Worksheets (Grades K–12), sorted by topic so you can see what fills the gap between two units.

How do I turn a physics unit into gradeable evidence?

Aim for one calculation check, one written explanation, and one task combining them. Written explanations are the piece teachers skip, and also the piece a competency rubric actually asks for, since a student who computes momentum but cannot say what it means has met half the standard. Ten minutes of writing per unit is enough if the prompt is specific.

For juniors and seniors, Advanced Mechanics | Momentum, Impulse, Projectiles & Circular Motion | Physics Unit | Honors & AP carries the harder mechanics with problems that escalate, so a second attempt at a competency is genuinely harder than the first rather than the same sheet reprinted. Keep one section of it unused during teaching and it becomes your reassessment bank in the spring, when the SAT at grade 11 has already taken a school day.

How do I plan the second half of the year in advance?

Sketch the whole year in August as six units with two floating weeks, then decide now which unit gives up time when February closes school. New Hampshire winters are reliable in that one respect. A plan that names its own casualty keeps the last topic taught properly instead of compressed into three periods before finals.

Electricity, magnetism and optics usually fill the back half of a physics course, and Electricity, Magnetism & Optics Bundle | Circuits, Induction & Lenses | 3 Complete Units | Grades 8–11 covers all three for grades 8 through 11 in one download, which keeps notation consistent from circuits into lenses. Teachers in the rest of the region plan against similar calendars, and the New England Teaching Resources (CT, ME, MA, NH, RI, VT) pages collect those states together if you are comparing sequences.

Frequently asked questions

Are these units written to the New Hampshire College and Career Ready Standards?

They are written to physics content rather than to New Hampshire's wording, so you map them yourself once. Read the standard, mark which pages and tasks produce evidence for it, then write the competency statement on the answer key. That mapping stays valid next year.

How does a competency-based report card change unit planning?

It changes what you keep rather than what you teach. Each unit needs one task a student can attempt again in a new context, plus a rubric worded like your competency statement. Plan that second task at the same time as the first, so it exists before anybody needs it.

Are these resources affiliated with the New Hampshire Department of Education?

No. They are independent teaching materials and are not affiliated with, approved by, or endorsed by the New Hampshire Department of Education, any district, or any assessment authority. Everything downloads instantly for you to review and adapt; for questions about a purchase, see the store's refund policy.

Related reading

• New Hampshire Physics: Teaching in the Weeks Around NH SAS
• Physics Across a Whole Department: A Plan for New Hampshire Teachers
• New Hampshire Teaching Resources & Worksheets (Grades K–12)