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Research engineering in your local area and describe how you would use a local building, structure or other engineering feature as inspiration for a classroom or outdoor design and make project
We are lucky enough to be right beside Maynooth Castle. There are excellent tours runs by the OPW where you learn all about the history of the castle and its structure. It would be an obvious choice for an engineering project. We went there this year in June and the guide told us all about the original structure- a motte and bailey castle which would have been built there first.
The Normans built motte and bailey castles as a quick defense structure before they built their much bigger stone castles. The class could be tasked with making a motte and bailey castle.
Use a small cardboard box for the keep. Either cut square into the top of the box to make the battlements or make cardboard strips to stick on top of the box. Paint the keep grey or brown. Once it’s dry, add details such as the gate, small windows and a few stones using a black pen. Stick it to the motte and then stick the staircase in place going from the gate to the floor.
Paint a blue moat around the base of the motte and bailey. Thick cardboard, can be pressed down into this area to make a real ditch. To make the motte use a big piece of cardboard as a base. Scrunch up newspaper pages into balls and stick them together using glue or sellotape. Finish off by wrapping the mound in a sheet of newspaper. Paint it green. Once it’s dry, stick it to the base.
To make the wall around the motte and bailey, cut two lengths of cardboard big enough to go around the bailey and the top of the motte. Cut lollipop sticks in half. Stick the lollipop sticks along the cardboard to make a wooden fence. Create a drawbridge out of cardboard and string and paint it brown.
The class could work in groups of 5/6 as there is a lots of different parts to the castle to be made and also painted. It would be an ideal time to use mixed ability pairings.
Outline how you would use some of the course resources to conduct a seasonal biodiversity project to run throughout the school year. What resources and recording sheets would you need? How often would you bring learning outdoors? How would you integrate other subject areas?
I would use the Wildflower Walk Challenge from Nature on Your Doorstep to conduct a seasonal biodiversity project. We are luck enough to have a large area of nature to walk through beside our school with an abundance of native plants and trees.
I’d begin by getting the class familiar with the plants and flowers in the area. WE would follow the steps on the challenge.
Step1: Look around: notice the colours and smells, bring magnifying glasses to look at them closely.Step 2: Is it a wildflower or a weed. Talk about different flowers eg: dandelions that we sometimes call weeds and their importance for biodiversity, bees etc
Step 3:Getting to know wildflowers: Bring Ipads to take photos of the flowers and try to identify them
Step 4 : Look for information: Back in class research the flowers and see if they can identify them.
Step 5: Welcome wild flowers. Look at planting a section of wild flowers in the school garden or another place in the school
We would do a walk with recording sheets to record pictures of the flower and characteristics of the flower. We would also take a few iPads to photograph them. We would do the walk in seasonally and take note of the changes in the flower in spring, summer, autumn and winter. This could be integrated into Maths by doing graphs, tally charts etc to record findings about the different wildflowers.
We do something similar in our school Fiona. We were looking for help in planting an new school garden. We wanted the children to be involved but also get a bit of expertise to ensure the school garden lasted as no one on staff felt too green fingered. The local tidy towns offered to help us and came in do do some planting with the children. They then offered to take them on a heritage/biodiversity walk around the town to make the children familiar with the history and nature in their own areas. Having a bit of local knowledge was brilliant and we all learned something from the planting and walk. We are lucky enough to have an outdoor classroom also which is a fantastic asset when it comes to studying biodiversity in the surroundings of the school.
This is a lovely idea for a lesson Fiona. It’s a good idea to give the children autonomy over their own map drawings and then to come together as a class to discuss. Children then have a chance to see if other people’s drawing/symbols might work better than the ones they had done themselves. It’s a great opportunity for peer learning. Layering up the map is something they would probably never have done before and is a great opportunity for new learning.
• Explore some of the online tools to gather information about land use, soil types, plants and animals, weather etc. in the area around your home or school and outline how you would integrate this information into local studies linking various curriculum areas
We would begin by looking at some of the satellite websites to begin to see how information on weather etc can be gathered from space. Then we would move on to looking at different maps- tourist maps, ordnance survey maps, orienteering maps, Google maps. We would switch between these to see how the level of detail differs from each one.
I would encourage the children to bring in a soil sample from home and using different soil description identification cards, they would try to identify what type of soil they have, clay, sandy, peat etc. I would also show them samples of lesser known soils to see if they could identify them- chalky, sandy etc.
We would then look at the different layers of soil and make a model of the different soil layers (bedrock, subsoil etc) in a plastic cup using different materials to represent the different layers.
This seems like an excellent activity Fiona. I have also done experiments looking at an arrow through a glass of water or a spoon/straw to show the refraction of light. It doesn’t always work at first and can require patience and co-operation within a group to complete the experiment successfully!
To show how to reflect light I would get children in pairs. One uses a torch to direct a beam of light at a mirror being held by the other. The challenge is to adjust the direction of the torch so the beam hits the other person. This activity shows light hits a mirror and bounces back.
This seems like an excellent activity Fiona. I have also done experiments looking at an arrow through a glass of water or a spoon/straw to show the refraction of light. It doesn’t always work at first and can require patience and co-operation within a group to complete the experiment successfully!
For reflection of light I would get children in pairs. One uses a torch to direct a beam of light at a mirror being held by the other. The challenge is to adjust the direction of the torch so the beam hits the other person. This activity shows light hits a mirror and bounces back.
This seems like an excellent activity Fiona. I have also done experiments looking at an arrow through a glass of water or a spoon/straw to show the refraction of light. It doesn’t always work at first and can require patience and co-operation within a group to complete the experiment successfully!
For reflection of light I would get children in pairs. One uses a torch to direct a beam of light at a mirror being held by the other. The challenge is to adjust the direction of the torch so the beam hits the other person. This activity shows light hits a mirror and bounces back.
Lesson on Mirrors for 4th Class
I would set up 3 mini activities for this and rotate the class in groups
Objective:
To understand that light from an object can be reflected by a mirror.
To know that we can see objects in mirrors because reflected light enters our eyes.
To know that the direction of a beam of light travelling from a light source can be drawn using a straight line and an arrow
Experiment 1: Reflection Tracing
Child 1: in dry-wipe pen or on a large piece of paper draws a wiggly line. Then hold a small torch keeping it very still and pointing in front
Child 2: has to use their mirror to reflect the torch’s beam of light onto the line and trace the line to the end.
Experiment 2: Periscopes
Kneeling down behind a chair, can children use 2 mirrors to make a basic periscope and see over the top of the chair. Draw a diagram to show how the light travelled from behind the chair, into their eyes
Experiment 3: Mirror writing
Rest a mirror vertically on a piece of paper. Write their name on the paper. They are only allowed to look at their hand in the mirror. Record observations
