I really liked the ideas based on the sun and shadows and think these would be so much fun to teach at any level.
I would begin my lesson in a similar way to what we saw in the video whereby I would pass around a ball (the sun) as a talking prompt and get the children to share PRK based on the sun. I would display this as a brainstorm on an anchor chart so we could revisit it later.
I would then work on the demonstration of the Earth spinning and why we have day and night/ only see the sun during the day. This idea comes from the spherical earth topic but I think it would link really nicely with this topic and would incorporate curriculum objectives also. I would have the children use the attribute bears as we saw to represent day and night i.e. facing the sun when it is day and away when it is night.
I would then ask the children to imagine teddy’s day. We would set up teddy on the tables and I would give the children time to free play with Teddy as he goes about his day. I would then explain we need to represent the sun shining so that it can really be day time for teddy. I would give the children their torches and have them experiment with shadow, coming up with and answering questions through exploring.
We would discuss what happened to the shadows based on the position of the sun. We would then go outside and do the tracing activity whereby I would have the children trace their partner’s shadow and swap.
We would revisit later in the day and redraw the shadows, discussing how they are different and why.