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Class plan to engage with Space Week (4-10 October) in my Senior Infant Class
Introduce the topic of space by learning some space songs;
Aistear: set up a space station, this will encourage the children’s playfulness and foster their natural curiosity and imagination. Children can ask questions, make predictions and develop their thinking. They’ll learn with their peers and through the fun activities provided throughout space week.
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Art: make a paper plate model of the solar system; children use a yellow pom pom for the centre to represent the sun and understand that the sun is the centre of the solar system and that all the planets, including Earth orbit the sun.
Oreo cookie moon phases
new moon, waxing crescent, waxing half(first quarter), waxing gibbous, full moon, waning gibbous, waning half (last quarter), waning crescent.
Children to make rockets and test how far they can go.
Read a selection of space related stories from the class library.
Excellent ideas and resources here Tracey. Great progression through the week and you’ve incorporated some wonderful online resources too. I look forward to using these during space week.
Animals in the Cold:
Links to SESE; Geography and weather and North/South Pole, History: Tom Crean SPHE: myself: taking care of myself, clothes. Math: counting
Read: Over in the Arctic by Marianne Berkes and Jill Dubin
Discuss: how do you think the animals in the arctic stay warm? How do we stay warm? Do you think you could live in the arctic? Why not?
Encourage children to justify their explanations. Children to learn that animals in these conditions survive by developing some specialized features that help them stay warm. This includes insulating fur, layers of fat and oily skin coatings.
Children should understand that arctic animals use adaptations that are necessary for their survival.
Watch the Ranger Rick video:
Which arctic animal was your favourite?
Children to make their favourite arctic animal in art.
Great ideas here Saoirse,
I love the suggestion of playing games and completing quizzes to reinforce learning, this can also be useful for assessment.
I would link an activity about aliens to learning about ourselves and our body parts.
Trigger story: Aliens love underpants
Read story and discuss. Look at illustrations, describe the aliens. What colour are they? What shape? How many eyes do they have? How are they similar to us? How are they different?
Make a similarities and differences chart.
Get children to cut out and stick their body parts to a template. 2 eyes, 2 ears, one nose, mouth, 2 arms, 2 legs, etc.
Use a traditional dice numbered 1-6, use a blank dice and write heads, eyes, ears, arms, legs, noses. Children roll both dice and have to draw the number of parts on to their alien template e.g 3 legs, etc.
Children take turns and compare their aliens with their partners, focus on math language more/less. My alien has more eyes than yours. Who’s alien has the most arms?
Get the children to colour in their aliens and make an interactive display for the classroom. Get the children to sort the aliens, what criteria? All aliens with more than 3 eyes.
Children to come up with sorting criteria, do some aliens fit into more than on category?
There is so many cross-curricular links with this lesson. Literacy, maths, art to name a few.
I think this will be a fun and engaging activity that will appeal to children’s natural curiosity and imagination.
Great ideas here Niamh, all very engaging and fun. The children will enjoy these immensely and it will reinforce what they’re learning about stars.
I would use the activity set: The Moon
as a starter I would use the nursery rhyme “Hey Diddle, diddle”.
We would talk about the cow jumping over the moon. Do you think that a cow really could jump over the moon?
Discuss when we see the moon(at night) and it’s different phases and what names we use, full moon, half moon, crescent moon. Link to math and shapes.
Show video of the moon landing. In groups children record things they noticed in picture or word form. What does the surface of the moon look like? How do you think it would feel to touch? How were the astronauts feeling? Would you like to walk on the moon? Children to create their own picture of the moon landing and use junk art materials to make their own apollo 11 rocket.
Some fantastic ideas here, thank you. I will definitely try some of these activities with my class this coming school year.
An inquiry based approach I would take to a lesson with Senior Infants would be to discuss how wearing a coat in winter helps to keep us warm.
I would start with a question- Is it better to wear a light jacket or a thick coat on a cold winter’s day? Children will think/pair/share and explain their thoughts to the class. A good time to do this is when Autumn is coming to an end and Winter is approaching as a lot of the children will start to wear warmer coats to school.
Children will be provided with a template and have materials to choose from to make a warm winter coat, it’s a good opportunity to observe and assess children, can they justify their choice? Are they choosing the materials for the correct purpose- i.e, it’s warm, rather than I like the colour, etc.
Key Objectives are that the children will learn that it is their body that is warm and that they are trying to block their bodies heat from moving to where it’s colder. A thick, woolly coat will do this better than a light, thin jacket.Hi,
I’m Carolann and I teach Senior Infants. My favourite space fact is that space is completely silent!
