Hi,My name is Elaine and I’ll be teaching Senior Infants in Sept,the same as this year. Was in SET for years and before that I mainly taught the older classes. I chose this course as I struggled to find time to teach Science this year as there is so much to cover so I’m looking forward to seeing how I can integrate this into Aistear and other areas.
A fact about space that I think is cool is that on the planet of Mercury, a day is twice as long as a year!
One inquiry based activity we did this year was on the topic of floating and sinking. The prompt I used was ‘The float and sink’song from Pinterest. This really helped to stimulate discussion around floating and sinking and to elicit prior knowledge also. I work in a Deis band 1 school with a very high percentage of foreign national students. So it was important to make sure they understood the terms first! What do these words mean? We then conducted our experiments to see which materials would sink or float. We did 2 or 3 collectively as a class before they conducted their own in small groups. I gave them different objects and got them to group them into 2 groups- the ones they thought would sink and then the ones they thought would float( predicting). They then tested them to see if they were right and recorded their results on a chart with pictures. They loved doing this! They then told me their findings.
I finished the lesson off by focusing on the importance of weight and volume. As a class,we tested various materials that had the same volume but different weights and then vice versa. The next step was to do these experiments in their own groups in the next lesson.