Hi, my name is Leanne and I will be teaching multiple classes this year as a Supply panel teacher.
My favourite fact about space is that a day on Mercury lasts longer than its year! Mercury moves around the sun faster than any other planet – making its year the equivalent of 88 Earth days. While a day on Mercury – the interval between one sunrise and the next – lasts 176 Earth days!
An inquiry-based activity that I taught this year involved the children in exploring forces. Strand: Energy and Forces. Strand unit: Forces. Learning outcomes: Explore, through informal activities with toys, forces such as pushing and pulling. For the lesson, we discussed forces and the effects they had on objects. The children then got involved with using forces to move toy cars. We drew a line on the tables and the children took turns to explore the amount of force needed to help our toy cars reach the line. The children loved to experiment with different ways of pushing and pulling the cars to get them to move just enough to reach the line and not fall off the other side of the table.
I look forward to learning more about space throughout this course.