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I have previously made the rockets with classes and found it very enjoyable and educational for all. However, I never explored the concepts of Alien Chemistry with them in advance of this. For that reason, I would complete the Alien Chemistry with them first, before doing the rockets the next time. To engage the children I would drop an Alka Seltzer tablet in the water and ask the children what is happening and where they think the bubbles are coming from? I would then connect this to their own experience of fizzy drinks by asking the questions outlined in the resource. We would then complete the dancing raisins task, making predictions, investigating, and discussing the outcome.
It is great to have links to sites with ready-made resources, so thank you!
I think the lesson on What Clothes To Wear? would be great for the children in my class. I would begin by playing a weather-based dress-up game where the children put on the most appropriate clothing for the weather card shown. We could also choose items of clothing and the other children could get what weather/season the child is thinking of. We would then discuss clothing across different weather and why it is so e.g. why do we wear a coat in winter? I would encourage the children to identify the functionality of clothes by asking why do we need a hat in winter but also in Summer? After this, I would then secretly assign a season to the children. The children would then place imaes of clothing that fit that season into the wardrobe, and the others have to guess the season. We would close with a discussion that we need different clothes for different seasons and weather.
Activity Set: Space and Aliens – Create an Alien
I think the open-ended nature of this task is achievable for my class as it facilitates varying levels of ability through hands-on creative experiences. I would begin by reading the story Aliens Love Underpants (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ADnAGBWlzqE) with the children. Following on from the story I would ask the children if they think there are any other clothes that the aliens wear. I would then lead this into characteristics of the alien’s bodies by asking how many arms do you think their jumpers would have? Do they need to wear Summer or Winter clothes on Mars? We would use images and the information from https://www.esa.int/kids/en/learn/Our_Universe/Planets_and_moons/Life_on_Mars to help. We would then sketch what we think our Aliens might look like and what they might be wearing. After they created their sketches we would make them in playdough first and then clay.Another idea to add to this further would be to incorporate the story of The Jolly Postman and take him to deliver letters to global locations featuring houses and homes typical to the area.
I love the idea of using play-doh as a pre-cursor, as I find clay can be challenging for this age. Making them first with play-dough enables the children to explore potential design pitfalls!
Activity Set: The Sun and Shadows – Sun Activities
I would use the “What do you do in a Day?” activity in my classroom as this enables the children to apply real-life experiences to their learning. I would like to integrate this with Art and get the children to make the puppets and the stage area. In doing so, we could further explore day/night concepts as they design the appropriate clothing their puppets wear throughout each stage of the day/night. This activity also supports the categorisation of certain places as associated with day (school) and night (bedroom) for example. Furthermore, as I teach in an AS class it also nicely incorporates visual scheduling for the children which further supports their learning. Most of this activity would be fantastic for my children but I would adapt the circling activity to a day and night sorting task as this is more visual for my particular children.I think the torch and a darkened area offer a great opportunity for children with complex needs to experience and consolidate the meaning of day/night, in a school setting.
Here is my mind map: https://coggle.it/diagram/Ys3UK2qIBdEcvJZ3/t/what-is-space
Strand: Materials
Strand Units: Properties and characteristics of Materials/Materials and Change
This is a lesson idea that I feel the children would be engaged with and enable them to use an inquiry-based approach too:
- Bring in a chocolate bunny to the class for Easter.
- Purposely place it in the sunlight where it will melt.
- Once the children notice that the bunny is melting, I would begin the discussion – by asking how, why and what they think happened to the bunny?
- I would then encourage the children to make predictions about where the bunny might not melt.
- The groups of children would be given a bunny to put in the place that they predicted the bunny would not melt.
- The children would then investigate which bunnies melted and which bunnies did not.
- Discuss why they did/did not melt.
Hi my name is Carina and I teach an AS class this year and will do so again next year. Her is my space fun fact: Neptune’s moon, Triton, orbits the planet backwards. It’s the only large moon in our solar system that does this.
In order to foster collaboration and problem-solving in the classroom, the children will work together to decide what resources we should purchase using our class budget. The details are outlined further in my Sway (https://sway.office.com/HZ23GszUbPWwu8xJ?ref=Link).
This activity fosters collaboration as the children are making decisions and working together, as they rely on each other to complete the task. They are also problem-solving throughout, as they establish a hierarchy of needs, maintain fairness in the decision-making process, and influence their environment.
