Hello, my name is Orlagh and I will be teaching first and second class this year. One amazing space fact that I discovered with the children this year was that one million Earth’s could fit inside the sun. The children found this fascinating.
One inquiry based approach to learning I have done with children in the past was about wellington boots. We had a child who has autism in the class and they were fixated on wellington boots so I used this within my lesson. First a read the children a story about Paddington Bear and of course Paddington wear Wellingtons. I then created a scenario for the children where Paddington had lost his Wellingtons and he was going to have to make some and what materials would be best for him to use.
The children were then divided into groups and each group was given a piece of rubber ( from a rubber glove), kitchen roll, tin foil, cling film and toilet paper. They had to predict which would work best. It was amazing the amount who thought kitchen roll as their parents etc use it to clean up spills.
The children then carried out the investigation and discovered that in fact rubber was the best material.