I write this to a physics teaching friend today. He helped me brainstorm the standards that I am working from for the year. I am unsure of the direction to head in next though. Now I put it out there for the crowd. I would like your help and I need it soon. I started the year with a study of essentially the work energy theorem, because they had no idea what energy was. I am sure they are all in a better place on that front, but they only have a GPE/KE/Work understanding at this point. I would like to move them into the next topic, but I am really unsure about where to head next. Here are my ideas and the concerns I have about each. Mainly you could think about these and comment back or just tell me to calm down.My comfort tells me to move on with energy into thermodynamics. This would get at your key concept, "Heat is microscopic energy, or energy stored microscopically." I have an idea of what labs to do to introduce it and how they will go. I worry that this is me controlling the direction too much. I think the kids would like to start work on circuits. We have identified what we will need to put in the buildings, fans, lights, CD players. To do this we are going to need to know about power and circuits and generation of poser and storage of power. This gets at key concept, "Capacitors and batteries store energy." and "Work stores energy" (generating electrical energy). I have added to that key concept two more key concepts: batteries do work (e.g. run fans, turn cds, make speakers move, light LEDs). My main concern here is that this is entirely uncharted territory for me. I did a little with DC circuits in the past, but nothing to this level. I do not really know where to start without getting really bogged down in a lot of details. I would rather have the students find out what they need to know. This will put each group in a radically different place with radically different details. I guess that is what I signed up for. Finally, I have a silly idea about teaching velocity but doing it in the context of wiring LED throwies. This would skip any mathematical understanding of circuits (for now) and replace the math with projectile motion and velocity. I would then somehow use the throwies to make videos to analyze. This would hopefully help us get at the concept of velocity being free. Thanks for listening.