[Frances McCarthy]

great- there is such a wealth of suggestions and ideas in the forum – I hope the teachers who did this course in the first week stick their noses back in!

[Frances McCarthy]

Aoife,

glad to know that the mice have been a hit -I do just love them.

I really like how you have planned for lots of discussion around:

we could discuss if there were ways to improve their rockets, what might they add to it or remove? How could they get it to go faster or slower? What makes the rocket stay on course? What propels their rockets? Could this be changed?

Somewhere I used to have a link to a video which showed a family doing rocket races and they found that the larger balloon was slower to get going, but went further, and the smaller balloon zipped off first but then ran out of air and stopped – so you could challenge your early finishers to test the effect of distance of race and how it interacts with size of balloon for determining who wins the race. Might include a mention of hare and tortoise!

[Frances McCarthy]

Laura,

quite recently I have found children (particularly boys) very interested in Elon Musk and Space X. The Starship is currently being tested, so has launches quite often. Most recently in June

Test 5 is planned for August.

[Frances McCarthy]

Michelle,

what a simple way to really encourage the children to keep going with a design. Once they know that the rocket will be built over time, they have so many reasons to keep adding to it and going back to it.

You could show them a time lapse of the ISS being built – it took years!

 

[Frances McCarthy]

Lucy,

You have identified a nice set of activities that fit with your classroom context of very young children. You can use selected parts of the inquiry framework as you see fit – here I like the way you have provided the starter question

“When I pour water on which is best at soaking up the water/ best at staying dry?”

and have structured the activity so that the children can describe how different materials behave when water is poured over them. Could you have even smaller bits of each material that the children could place on a GOOD AT SOAKING UP card or on a BAD AT SOAKING UP? (or similar – the ideal would be an image like the one of the cat looking at the tub of water in ESERO 4)

I tried to use AI art to make what I was thinking of (my drawing skills are stick men!) but I didn’t quite get it. I asked for saucers (and got tea cups too!)

[Frances McCarthy]

Sarah,

Your idea of

We could explore the planets here in more detail and after this study we would then decide which planet would best suit their alien.

seems to be a perfect way to link science content (facts about the planet) to the created alien and access some pretty high order thinking skills! The child who can say – Venus is really hot with acid rain, so the alien with the thick skin will do best because their skin will protect them (like a hippo) is doing brilliantly.

[Frances McCarthy]

Ciara,

thanks for sharing such a lovely Space Week Plan – may I add it to my shareable lessons?

The Hippo to the Moon site has some additional activities, I really like the sheet of images for a child to retell the story

https://s22428.pcdn.co/wp-content/uploads/2015/09/The-First-Hippo-on-the-Moon-Resources-2.pdf

 

[Frances McCarthy]

Katie,

is there a particular story from the ones recommended here that you think will appeal to your class?

The reference picture I like for the solar system is this page:

https://science.nasa.gov/solar-system/planets/

compare it to this one: https://www.esa.int/kids/en/learn/Our_Universe/Planets_and_moons/The_Solar_System_and_its_planets

https://www.esa.int/ESA_Multimedia/Images/2014/08/Explore_our_Universe_poster which you can download and use.

You could add a nice reflection here on how much detail is needed to show a planet.

 

[Frances McCarthy]

Hi Fiona,

what a lovely book – I haven’t seen it in a while, but when I checked the author’s site I recognised it.

http://www.bobcrelin.com/fotmpeek.html

There is a full teacher guide to it here.

Just note that phases of the Moon are not included in the Irish curriculum until Junior Cycle – for primary children should be aware of the Moon, but even in 5th/6th class the emphasis is

• recognise that the Earth, its moon, the sun, other planets and their satellites are separate bodies and are parts of the solar system

• develop a simple understanding of the interrelationship of these bodies, including day and night and seasonal movements

So treat the changing appearance of the Moon as shadows of itself. Misunderstandings of the phases of the Moon are common and discussion around them can be very useful for children to think of the Earth and Moon as objects in space, lit by the Sun, and day and night on the Moon causes it to change appearance for us.

 

[Frances McCarthy]

Eleanor,

if you can take a picture of it and save that picture on your computer, you can upload the picture from your drive to this forum.

See this screen shot that tries to show where you can upload. ^^^^

[Frances McCarthy]

Katie-

I hadn’t thought about sharing opinions – and it such a good way to connect space to ethics.

Science opinions should reference facts -so could you ask children to explain why they think a certain way? I’m often asked if I think aliens exist and I answer “Yes and No” Yes – there are so many stars in so many galaxies that even if the chance of life on another planet was 1 in a million, when you have 200 billion (which is 200, thousand million) in just our galaxy, then that is 200,000 possible planets with life. And there are 2 trillion galaxies.

The No is because space is big, so I don’t think the Earth has ever been visited by aliens (even though I love alien science fiction!)

[Frances McCarthy]

Rhonda,

another historical figure to mention is Eratosthenes, who calculated the size of the Earth from shadows. He knew the Earth was round.

The Eratosthenes experiment: calculating the Earth’s circumference

has an activity for second level students – if you do the maths, you could have your class do the measurements.

and this site has the great Carl Sagan explaining what Eratosthenes did.

https://surroundedby.science/2023/03/15/discovering-the-size-of-the-earth-the-eratosthenes-experiment/

[Frances McCarthy]

Rhonda,

you can find some of those constellation stories in the UNAWE material. Other cultures can be found here: https://assa.saao.ac.za/astronomy-in-south-africa/ethnoastronomy/

What is interesting is that the Irish language stories about constellations are few. See this article https://telescoper.blog/2023/08/29/celestial-echoes-the-night-sky-in-irish-folklore/

For Starry night – check out the spaceweek tv broadcast made by my colleagues Danielle and Donna.

 

[Frances McCarthy]

Niamh,

an interesting prompt for further investigation linked to this is “where in the world do we find the most meteorites?”

Because many meteorites look a lot like earth rocks, we find them in deserts and the Antarctic, where they stand out.

See this article: https://askanearthspacescientist.asu.edu/finding-meteorites

So as a next step, using their knowledge of meterorites, they can look at the map on the site and consider why meteorites were seen to fall in those locations.

 

[Frances McCarthy]

Aisling,

I agree with you on the utility of the ESERO activities. On the main esero.ie site you can see lots of them, sorted by strand and strand unit. Use the number of the resource to get an indication of the age level it is suitable for – 1-20 for Infants, 21-40 for 1st/2nd class, but of course, you can adapt as needed.

With regards to SSE – I think the science environmental awareness strand could be an interesting focus.

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