It’s a mistake to think that we don’t have time to explicitly teach the sentences that students need to talk about physics. Teaching key phrases and sentence building techniques unlocks understanding and deepens knowledge. Explicitly teaching how to read physics sentences also mean your students have a fighting chance of understanding what GCSE questions are asking them. In this post, I’m writing about propositions: small words which help describe where something is and how it is moving. I’m focusing on one topic and I hope my point is clear: each topic requires this work. The key prepositions for energy are: in, to, from and by.
Energy is the most abstract of concepts. We use prepositions all of the time to explain where it is (e.g. in the thermal store) or how it is moving (e.g. transferred from the gravitational potential store to the kinetic store). These stores are also abstract concepts, and energy can’t really be located in space. These prepositions are doing jobs that the English language didn’t intend for them. There’s a good chance students will get lost.
| Intention of the sentence | How the preposition helps | Example |
| Locating Energy | Specify the location or form of energy within the ‘energy stores’ model. | “Energy stored in the battery.” “Energy of a moving object.” |
| Describing Transfers | Name the start and end points of an energy transfer. | “Transferred from the chemical store to the thermal store” |
| Specifying Pathways | Name the mechanism by which energy is transferred. | “Transferred by heating,” “Work done by forces.” |
For suggestions on how to teach sentences, take a look at an earlier post: https://readingforlearning.org/2025/04/15/build-better-sentences-in-science-writing/
You might also be interested in conjunctions (when, as, while) in physics sentences: https://readingforlearning.org/2025/06/26/as-when-while-three-small-words-that-unlock-meaning-in-physics/
I know other colleagues have done work on this in their science departments: I’m keen to share notes. Please message me.
Ben
Reading for Learning 