Speed Skating: The Push Against the Ice

At the 2026 Winter Olympics in Milan, American skater Jordan Stolz won the men's 1,000-meter race in about a minute and six seconds. How does a skater move that fast on slippery ice? Newton's third law: the blade pushes back on the ice, and the ice pushes the skater forward. This one-page activity walks grade 6 students through that real, medal-winning example and asks them to explain why a skater could not speed up at all on perfectly frictionless ice.

What's Included

• 1 student page: a short news story plus four cards (What's the Story? multiple choice, a fill-in reasoning chain with word bank, Cause & Effect matching, and a Why Does It Matter? sentence starter)
• 1 teacher key page with every answer, a sample written response, the TEKS/NGSS alignment box, links to the original NBC Olympics and Olympics.com reports, and a short science-connection summary
• Letter-size PDF, no prep

How It Helps You Teach

• Turns TEKS 6.7C into a story students may have watched: a real Olympic race won on the ice
• Shows that the action-reaction forces act on two different objects (the skate and the ice) at the very same instant
• The key's article links let you show students the source, which builds trust and supports media literacy

Pair It With

This sheet is part of a four-activity Newton's Third Law set: Context Clues, Inferences, Science in the News, and Science Sort (Pair or Not a Pair?). Check out our library for the other three and the full set.

Standards: TEKS 6.7C; NGSS MS-PS2-1. Part of the Daily Science series by Workybooks.