Solving Newton's 2nd Law Problems

The demo mentioned in the bellwork was pulling a tablecloth out from underneath some dishes.

First we walked through a standard problem involving Newton's 2nd Law:

At this point we practiced on the worksheet Net Force and Acceleration (link to the back). I don't have an electronic version of the front. You also received Forces Practice for homework. This contains conceptual problems similar to what you'll see on the next test.

For the Honors classes, at the end of the period we did the same practice problem as before but made the pulling force at an angle. Notice that the basic procedure does not change, but when finding the net force in each direction we have to break up the angled force into its x and y components. We also skipped the stuff in the y direction because we already knew the acceleration in the y direction is zero, so net force in the y direction is zero.