Hi, my name is Jessica Markey and I am a Junior Infant teacher in a DEIS Junior school. I have been an infant teacher for the past two years. I decided to do this course to expand my knowledge on space and hopefully use this new understanding of space in my current teaching position. My favourite fact about space is that it is completely quiet.
An inquiry based activity that I would like to do with my Junior Infants is ‘Storm in a Glass’. I have done this experiment with older children (SI, FC and SC) and think it would be a great hands-on activity for an Aistear based lesson.
The trigger for this lesson would be a previous Literacy lesson about the book ‘One Stormy Night’ and a follow up lesson geared towards Winter/Weather.
Throughout my years of teaching, I have seen how children question or often wonder where rain comes from or why is there more/less rain on different days or in different areas. I would begin this lesson by showing the children a wet sponge and tell them to pretend that the sponge is a cloud. I would tell them to notice that by adding more water to the sponge, more water comes out. This would give the children more of an idea of what happens when it rains more – the cloud is bigger so more rain falls. We would then move onto a glass or clear container filled with 3/4 water. We would create a ‘cloud’ using shaving foam. I would ask thought provoking questions such as “what do you think will happen if I add water to the cloud?”, “what would happen if I now added more water?” Eventually, the children should be able to identify what happens if we add more water or “rain”.
I think this is a brilliant hands-on and messy water activity for young children.