Hello everyone. My name is Síle and I teach Junior Infants for the past few years but taught the Senior classes previously. I love teaching the theme of Space in every class level. My class at the time and I loved everything to do with the Rosetta-Philae project. My fact is After bouncing off the surface twice, Philae achieved the first-ever “soft” (nondestructive) landing on a comet.
I love how easily the theme of Space lends itself naturally to inquiry based learning. I find children to be fascinated by rockets. It gives them lots of opportunity for hands on learning and loads of chances for trial and error. I usually start off making paper airplanes with the class and they get to investigate how to make them fly furthest. They quickly learn the impact wind can have when flying outside. I then tend to move on the paper straw rockets which are easy enough to do with Infants but also interesting for older children. I have seen children naturally investigate how straw width, size, weight and angles impact their rockets.
I have also experience of leading the activity listed on the website called Rocket launch with older classes. This activity lends itself to inquiry based learning because the children have a number of areas that they can investigate especially size and shape of balloon and length of string.