Hey my name is Lauren and I am a junior/senior infant teacher. I am also the newly appointed STEM coordinator in my school so I am looking forward to getting some great ideas to do with space as I would love for my school to take part in space week in the coming school year.
My favoutite space fact is that footprints left on the moon won’t disappear as there is no wind!
An inquiry based activity/lesson I use in the infant classroom is “What material is waterproof?”, we normally cover this when doing the theme of sea creatures/aquarium. The trigger I use is a note/letter from a mermaid who has damaged some of her tail and she is wondering what material would be best to repair it (and it needs to be waterproof). So first of all we discuss what waterproof actually means and highlight why it is important for her tail to be waterproof. Then as a class we make a list of materials that we think might help the mermaid, and then we investigate which of these materials are waterproof. We also discuss how are we going to test this. The children work in groups and record their results. We then draw a picture of the mermaids tail and stick down which material we discovered was best. Then a nice follow on activity is to design and create a waterproof jacket/umbrella for our class teddy bear.