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Sinead, I completely agree with you on stellarium web being used by teachers – it is a complex site with lots of functions to show the night sky.
It looks great on a whiteboard, but if you have a spare data projector, take it to the biggest wall you can find in a room that can be darkened and point it to the wall for a huge display of the sky. Mindblowing and huge!
Have you particular Marvin & Milos that you think would work with your age cohort?
I like stellarium web, but the original downloadable stellarium software is so powerful – and the fact that it doesn’t need the internet once installed means that you can happily leave a few students exploring it.
Hi Barbara,
what age would you do this with? Life cycle of a star was in the curriculum when I taught second level in the UK, but not anywhere in the Irish curriculum.
If you have children who are interested in this, you can engage everyone in the class by asking if they have noticed that stars at night are slightly different colours – in particular if you look at Orion, the top left star is slightly reddish tinged, and the bottom right star is a brighter blue-white. This has to do with the type of star they are.
Orion is visible in the early evening in January-February, so easy to see as soon as it gets dark. It disappears into the sunset in May.
Hi Sinéad ,
the children might not get the reference any more, but I always describe this as a ‘Father Ted’ moment — this cow is nearby and small, that cow is far away and big!
Hi Roisin,
do you have links to the particular story and songs you use? it’s great to learn from each other.
Creating surface collages for planets is so great – and looks fabulous as a display.
Hi Sinéad,
You could adapt that demonstration to become more inquiry focused by showing the rainbow happening, then asking the children what they wonder or would like to try differently (and why they think it would make a difference).
for example: ” I wonder if we could make the rainbow faster… what would happen if we used different paper (like greaseproof paper)? or put the colours in a different order or ….”
These set demonstrations can serve as a wonderful prompt, but the science learning by inquiry is based on the children using their own understanding to develop their ideas further. For that they need to have familiarity and some working mental model of the scenario and be challenged to explain it further and to use it to predict what will happen.
Hi Michelle,
I agree with you on children coming in with more science background – and even if they don’t, tidying up a mess is a frequent, familiar context for them to use for their science.
Michelle – that is the beauty of the inquiry approach – it differentiates activities naturally as children pose different questions that they would like to explore.
Sean – would you have them carry this out at home after school? It gets dark by 5pm in the winter, so lots of time for them to look before bedtime.
Great stuff – something for everyone there, and very doable in the classroom.
Every year Space Week is 4-10 October, this year that falls on a Friday to the following Thursday, but Space Week can easily be Mon-Friday in your own school.
Don’t forget to register this as an event on spaceweek.ie.
What a great set of activities for Space Week – please make sure your register your class this year!
If you want more
Astronaut Training: Set up an obstacle course. Pretend students are astronauts navigating through space stations.
check out MissionX (scroll down the front page to find the physical activity section if you google the name).
Sean,
this is a very doable plan, particularly if a fizzy vitamin tablet tube makes the core of the spacecraft that is then decorated to look more spacecrafty.
if you wanted to design the interior of the spacecraft, then use this resource (Humans in Space from spaceweek.ie) instead.
Yvonne – there are some images of shelters in the ESA resource “Moon Shelter” which could be useful in this activity – they come from very different parts of the world, including the Antarctic shelters that scientists use.
I hadn’t heard that description of the new maths curriculum – but you are so right!
I’m also interested to see how moving Geography and Science apart a bit will work, since I think there are so many similar skills between Geography and Science (and of course, Earth and Space is a topic in SESE Geography!).
