One of the most common questions I get about teaching AP Physics comes from new teachers: “Where do I start?!” Setting up your AP Physics 1 curriculum can be a challenge. Let’s take a look at the major content areas in AP Physics 1 and how to organize them into a curriculum plan for your course.
Hopefully, this guide will help you figure out how College Board organizes their course. In addition, I’ll show you how that translates into real timing and order of instruction in a classroom.
AP Physics 1 official units
College Board breaks AP Physics 1 down into seven units. These are, including their approximate weight on the AP exam:
- Kinematics (12-18%)
- Dynamics (16-20%)
- Circular Motion and Gravitation (6-8%)
- Energy (20-28%)
- Momentum (12-18%)
- Simple Harmonic Motion (4-6%)
- Torque and Rotational Motion (12-18%)
Previously, AP Physics 1 also included waves and electricity, but as of the 2021 Course and Exam Description, these have been removed from the course to streamline the AP Physics 1 curriculum to only include mechanics.
Also, note that a lot of these topics overlap with each other. Though circular motion and gravitation is only 6-8% of the national exam, you could absolutely see a free-response question on gravitation that also includes parts on energy, momentum, etc. This would make gravitation technically jump up in percentage. I don’t interpret these numbers as hard and fast cut-offs for each topic, but more of a general guide.
AP Physics 1 curriculum in the classroom
Like most teachers, I tend to have a preferred way of doing things. These unit breakdowns are a little newer to the AP Physics curriculum, so I created my own order of topics. My order of instruction looks more like this:
- One dimensional kinematics
- One dimensional forces
- Dynamics (including two dimensional kinematics and forces)
- Circular motion and gravitation
- Momentum
- Energy
- Torque and rotational motion
- Simple harmonic motion
This is updated from my previous order of instruction to reflect the 2021 changes. I may move simple harmonic motion to before rotational motion now that the AP Physics 1 curriculum does not include waves. We’ll see after testing it out with students.
I like breaking kinematics and dynamics up into 1D and 2D sections as it eases students into the course with simpler topics. That way, we can also work on how the course is set up, types of FRQs, etc. as we work on the first two units. Then by the time we get to 2D motion, which is typically much more difficult for students, they have a grasp on the course and how questions are structured.
Also, I also got into doing momentum before energy as that’s what my textbook did and I decided to try it out. It worked well so I stuck with it! I think momentum and energy *can* be taught in either order, so it is up to your preference.
Timing and pacing your course
My school operates on a daily 50 minute class period. I typically have about 30 weeks of instruction time (taking out 3 weeks for after AP exams and 3 weeks for each quarters’ exam week), or around 8 weeks in quarters 1-3 and 6 weeks in quarter 4. My approximate time breakdown looks like this:
- Course introduction and skills – 1 week
- Graphing, math skills, laboratory skills
- One dimensional kinematics – 3 weeks
- Motion terms, constant velocity, uniform acceleration, motion graphs
- One dimensional forces – 3 weeks
- Force terms, free-body diagrams, Newton’s laws
- Dynamics – 4 weeks
- Vectors, forces in two dimensions, dynamic systems, kinematics in two dimensions, projectile motion
- Circulation motion and gravitation – 2 weeks
- Circular motion, law of gravitation, gravitational fields
- Momentum – 3 weeks
- Momentum, impulse, conservation of momentum, collisions
- Energy – 4 weeks
- Mechanical work and power, energy and energy transfer, conservation of energy, collisions extension to energy
- Rotational motion – 4 weeks
- Rotational kinematics, torque, rotational dynamics, rotational kinetic energy, conservation of angular momentum
- Simple harmonic motion – 2 weeks
- period of simple harmonic oscillations, energy in simple harmonic motion
- AP exam review – 4 weeks
- 1-2 class period to review each unit, exam review module, labs to reinforce tying units together, full length practice exam
Removing waves and electricity gives a lot more breathing room in the AP Physics 1 curriculum. Before their removal, I still did 4 weeks of review. It definitely gave me less time on energy and momentum. I LOVE having that extra time for those two very important topics!
Some teachers give more or less (or no!) time for review at the end. However, I feel very strongly about having four entire weeks for review. As I work within a 50 minute period, it takes me four class periods to do a full-length practice exam. I previously wrote a bit about how I structure this review, but typically in weeks two and three, we take two days to do half of the full-length exam. This gives us an entire week right before the national exam to dig deep into their exam scores and make last-minute strategy adjustments.
Putting it all together
In conclusion, I hope this breakdown was helpful to you as you work on setting up or adjusting your AP Physics 1 curriculum. If you are a returning AP Physics 1 teacher, I know that revising your course after the unit removals is both a blessing and a curse. I certainly appreciate the extra time to focus on mechanics and save waves and electricity for AP Physics 2!