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There are so many options and activities that can be done when you introduce stars. the children are fascinated by them and rightly so.
However the activity set that I will be focusing on is space and Aliens. I think it opens such a creative element to space and the children love it. One of the stories I always start with is the Man on the Moon and the children find it hilarious. There are so many lovely storybooks around aliens such as Aliens love underpants and the Smeds and Smoos. we do so much Drama and art out of this and i find it always draws the children who are not confident to come out of their comfort zones as the sillier an alien looks the better.
We also link this in sometimes with Maths and get them to roll a dice for the eyes, arms, antennae, etc and they have to draw how many the dice says. and sometimes I get the children to fold up paper into 4 strips and play musical chairs. WHen the children land on the next chair, they draw the next part without seeing the previous drawing.Our Christmas play that I have done for anumber of years is called Christmas with the Aliens and it is a lovely transition from Space which I usualy do in November to our festive season.
I love the Smeds and the Smoos! I also do an art lesson from it but will definitely be trying 3d ones next year!
The activity set that I will be focusing on going forward will definitely be the Moon. Although we do lots of work on the planets, I find that we don’t spend enough time on the moon. I love the ideas of creating a man on the moon and using lots of different materials. It makes so much sense seeing as it is the first element of space that children are exposed to.
One activity that my class particularly enjoyed to realise the grand scale of space was to get some playdough and divide it into 51 parts. They then, in pairs, put them in two groups, one to represent the moon and the other to represent the earth. It is interesting to see their different understandings on the size difference.
The actual ratio is 50:1I absolutely love these activity! Particularly the planet game where they run around and land on the hoops when they hear a planet name. I find, especially with the smaller ones, they find it hard to remember the names and as we know, repetition is key! https://esero.ie/wp-content/uploads/2015/01/01_The-planets.pdf
As Fiona has done, I love to get the children to take out a toy and trace around it on the yard using chalk. However, I have never thought to take them out at different times of the day to review the shadow and see the differences depending on where the sun is. This is a great idea and one I will definitely be doing in the future.
I love this idea. I recently saw an activity where the children paint onto black paper using suncream and then left them out in the sun. After a few hours, they reviewed their pictures and saw the importance of using Suncream to protect themselves from UV rays
I love this idea. In the past, I have used different foods to highlight the differences in size, with the smallest (Mercury) being a peppercorn and the largest (Jupiter) being a watermelon
Hello, my name is Clodagh and I will be teaching Senior Infants this coming year.
I love teaching about space and always find that the children are so engaged in it. I primarily use inquiry based discovery and story books to help my children understand.One activity that my class particularly enjoyed to realise the grand scale of space was to get some playdough and divide it into 51 parts. They then, in pairs, put them in two groups, one to represent the moon and the other to represent the earth. It is interesting to see their different understandings on the size difference.
The actual ratio is 50:1they have also loved investigations with different food and comparing the sizes of different planets.
I never realised how many resources were available on the esero website and particularly the Climate detectives initiative. I really look forward to trying them with my class in September
