Hello all,
My name is Orla and I teach in a large primary school in Dublin. Next year I will be teaching second class. An interesting space fact is 564 people have been into space – of that number 65 of them were women.
From September onwards I plan to use an inquiry-based activity about gravity and falling things in the classroom. I will engage in this activity when I am completing the ‘Energy and Forces’ unit of work. The students will investigate how forces act on objects. We will speak about push and pull forces. We will complete some examples (using objects such as a toy car) in small groups before showing our investigations to the whole class. We will then explore the effects of gravity using the ESERO resources as a guide. I will then provide different objects for the children to name and explore the effect of gravity on. To investigate we will devise our starter question and predictions. We will choose somewhere safe from which to drop our objects at the same time. We will measure the height of the drop, so it’s the same each time. We will observe and record our results and what we see. We will repeat the drop three times, recording our results. After conducting the investigation in small groups we will analyse and interpret our results, before writing our conclusions.. Perhaps as a follow on we could complete the egg parachute experiment depending on the ability of the class.