Michelle & Ellen,
Ramps have been suggested as one of the key topics to help young children directly experience forces in playful, unstructured learning. The team at Iowa’s Regent’s Centre for Early Developmental Education have done a lot of work on “Ramps and Pathways,” which you can find here: https://regentsctr.uni.edu/ramps-pathways/ramps-pathways
They state “Ramps & Pathways provide contexts for children to feel success, and also a context to understand how mistakes are opportunities to learn.”
and suggest that teachers should pay particular attention to vocabulary and avoid words such as acceleration, mass, velocity, and momentum, using instead :
Positional Words and Phrases
Higher, lower, next to, between, on top of, under or underneath, beside, behind, in front of, below, above
Directional Words
Down, up, forward, backward, sideways, through, over
Descriptive Words for Movement (or lack of)
Fast, slow, stable, steady, solid, wobbly, roll, slide, jiggle, tumble, teeter, jerky, bumpy, bouncy, smooth
Descriptive Words for Properties
Hard, soft, flexible, metal, glass, wood, plastic, heavy, light, hollow, solid, round, cylinder, cube, sphere
General Vocabulary
Incline, ramp, pathway, track, object, speed, system