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Áine, you have a lovely plan to engage infants. And I’d reward the child who spots the exaggerated science in the story.
(https://www.ashlea.notts.sch.uk/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/Whatever-next.pdf)
HINT: the Moon is closer to the Earth than any star.
Louise,
both Venus and Jupiter will be very easy to see in the evening sky this October, so you could add some stargazing of actual planets too!
I like your wide approach to the theme of Planets and how you have really focused on the playful needs of young children.
I’ve reminded my colleague of the certs – we definitely used to have them on spaceweek.ie for teachers to use, but I had a quick poke around and didn’t find them for this year.
Sarah,
the Planet game is great fun – I have played it with 8 and 9 years olds, as well as with the much younger crowd. It helps to have a list of words ready, since you will run out of “astronaut” “moon” “star” etc as you try to have those words between the planet names.
Mary, glad to see that you are working out ways to incorporate this course’s science and space ideas into your own classroom and linking it to existing units.
Michelle – if the Plough, with 7 stars to position is too challenging, you could try Cassiopeia, and that is described as activity 5.4 on page 149 of Universe in Box.
In that version, the stars are held on sticks.
Mary, thanks for your thoughtful consideration of this resource for your class. Measuring out the lengths would need some good fine motor skills – and practice with placing one end at zero etc — I have had second level students who didn’t know how to measure out lengths!
Sinead,
making boats is a lot of fun, but the science can be a little bit tricky. I find it best to start with rafts – where they have to float on the top of the water, and in later classes look at boats that displace water and hence float.
For those type of boats you can make a simple currach out of plain printer paper and it will last long enough to be tested a few times.
Alyson, I really like how you have linked Space to many areas of the curriculum. I think maths could sneak in there too.
There is this lunar mission timeline – but it’s pretty wide.
Depending on the age of the children you could find a mission that launched when they were born and have them track what their personal time line has been as it travelled across space.
Or you could use JUICE which launched last year and will do several gravity assists before getting to Jupiter in 2031 and have the children think about what they will be doing in 7 years time.
NOTE: this was made in response to a post that has now moved to Module 5 forum.
Hi Deirdre, the image hasn’t come out. If you want to upload an image from your computer you can select the little picture icon, then browse to where you have the image saved and upload.
Sounds like a lot of fun, with maths and science and art all intertwined.
A really simple astronaut experience is to bring in ski gloves or work gloves and ask the children to do simple tasks with these big bulky gloves on.
They can see this image of Neil Armstrong’s gloves.
Hi Siobhan,
flour is a good surface for this, but needs to be disposed off afterwards (food source in the classroom). I tend to use different sands that I get from B&Q or other suppliers. The sand can be dried (so if you get sand, allow about a week for it to dry enough to use) so that it flows easily and makes simple craters. If you use wet sand the balls just drop and make a hole exactly the size of the ball!
This is lovely if you look at some of the craters that have clear ejecta – like Tycho.
https://science.nasa.gov/resource/tycho-crater-on-the-moon-labeled/
Hi Louise,
would you use the mystery boxes in the way that I have seen them presented – where you do NOT open them at all – they remain sealed for the whole year and the children can bring them out every now and then as they learn more. So, they can be brought out when you are doing magnets, so that they can see if anything inside reponds to magnetic force.
