Hi everyone, my name is Matk and I have been interested in space since I was very young. I have been teaching on the senior end for nearly 20 years and will be teaching on the junior end this coming year.
One very interesting thing about space that I recently learned is that our sun is falling through space at 70,000km per hour and it is dragging out solar system with it. If you haven’t seen the video please Google “the helical model” as it is really well demonstrate.
A way in which I could promote inquiry based learning would be the following.
I would ask the children to imagine the they were standing in a trampoline. ” What would happen if I threw lots of small ball on the the trampoline?” ” Would they stay in the edge or roll towards you?”
The children, in groups of five, would then be given large pieces of fabric with in child holding each of the four corners. The fifth child would place a heavy object in the center and roll light balls onto the fabric.
The balls would roll towards the center and demonstrate the suns amazing pull on our planets.
The children could remove the heavy object and try the experiment again.” What happened this time” and “why did all the balls not roll towards the center?
This experiment can help to show the children the gravitational pull that larger objects have in smaller objects.