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Hi Criona,
The Curious Minds ESERO CPD which has been offered to schools has a workshop “The Journey to Space” which touches on this exact activity.
We haven’t included the full activity in this course, since I felt some of it was a bit too much for Junior Classes.
The video we used in that is the Chris Hadfield talking about recycling water aboard the ISS – you can find it here.
The cleaning dirty water outline is “Can You Live on Mars?” from esero.ie.
I think it works well as a Design and Make activity, with children testing their predictions by making a filtration system.
Hi Alyson,
You can find some activities on solar system and scales here and in Irish.
and the club resource from spaceweek.ie has a table with the steps for a walking solar system.
This might be useful to extend the learning to show the spacing of the planets, which is very unexpected.
so instead of just
The children need to rearrange themselves in order of closest and furthest away to the sun.”
ordering themselves, they can try to space themselves out as well.
This can then link nicely to your question of “how this could effect the planet.” Children might find out about how temperature varies with distance from a heat source – and they could use a radiator in winter as the heat source. Children’s predictions could be tested to develop and confirm their scientific understanding.
Hi Fiona,
I love rocket mice – it is a favourite of our “Move It” workshop for Junior and Senior Infants.
I like to give the children different colour mice, so that they can then respond to “what colour mouse works best?” and explore the difference between different children launching vs the colour.
Hi Claire,
you can see the same article I mentioned earlier, that shows an American example of implementing children’s ideas about forces with ramp and toys.
Fair testing may go out the window with such a range of ideas, but this can be included in teacher discussion with each group – by asking “how do you know that the size of the truck made the difference – could it have been the how steep the ramp was?”
Hi Sean,
Ramps are a key component for child centred learning about forces.
There is a Curious Minds resource on slopes.
This article is from the US, but clearly describes how ramps can be used with young children in an inquiry style.
Hi Irene,
dropping objects is always fun and lots of learning can happen. I’m not so sure about using a stop watch unless you have some sort of parachute, since the objects will be falling quite quickly and the errors in stop and starting the timer will be greater than the difference between the two objects.
I’d suggest just having a race- and the one that hits the ground first is the winner.
With a much older class you might use the acoustic timer from phyphox and make a sound as the object is dropped and then the phone can pick up the sound of the landing and stop the timer. When I tried this just now, the time for the object to drop was 0.64 seconds.
Hi Laura,
Which activity about pushes and pulls would you do with junior infants? Would you use the example from the module of toy cars being moved in as many ways as you can think?
Hi Ursula,
is this the book you recommend? https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/161179929-jupiter-the-gassy-giant
The framework of inquiry has been designed to help you planning for inquiry activities that help children learn science through the inquiry process. You might go deeper into the children’s understanding of colour with Jupiter as your theme with this resource from spaceweek.ie https://www.spaceweek.ie/wp-content/uploads/2020/04/Gas-Planet-Clouds.pdf
The children could predict which colours they would get when they mix the food colouring – perhaps referring to their understanding of paint. Then the inquiry process would show them if their understanding was correct.
Hi Eleanor,
Teddy raincoats is a lovely way to bring the Inquiry process to the infant classroom.
The prompt is appropriate and visual – we don’t want teddy to get wet!
The materials for investigation are easy to source and only small quantities are needed. Droppers can make it feel ‘sciencey’ and are easy to get if you save children’s medicine droppers.
Pair work allows the children to chat to each other about what they think will happen and to share their predictions.
Class discussion at the end leads to a ‘next step’ that is suitable and can be a new investigation.
You can see this in English and Irish from Curious Minds.
Yvonne – I love this idea. It really mirrors actual space missions where the instructions have to be sent to the missions in advance because of signal time delays.
I have done a similar analog with children, where they have to choose from a set of cards which instruction to send to the ‘spacecraft’ and then one child is the ‘radio wave’ and they have to walk to the ‘spacecraft’ who continues moving.
It was a lot of fun when ‘turn left’ arrived at the space craft long after the spacecraft had passed the planet. The activity was originally part of the New Horizons education resources, I’ll see if I can find the original link.
Saoirse,
Have you thought about how the framework for inquiry might be used for gravity activities?
Here is an example of a senior infant class, with a demonstration of a spinning bucket and how the spinning can balance gravity and stop the water from coming out of the bucket – this could be a great prompt to get the ideas going.
The module gives the example of the very simple ESERO Activity of dropping things – would that be too simple for your Senior Infants?
Could you say a bit more about your step 4?
Research: Have students research more about gravity. They can explore how gravity works in space, why objects fall at the same rate regardless of weight, or even the history of our understanding of gravity.
What books or supports might senior infants need to do this research? Have you videos that you might show them that you can recommend? Please note that ideas of rate of fall and it being independent of mass is something that would be covered at leaving certificate level in Ireland.
I love Pluto! Still a planet to me.
You can see the images of Pluto sent back by the New Horizons mission, launched in 2006 and passing Pluto in 2015. Of course, this was a fly-by, if we had wanted to put the spacecraft into orbit then the journey would have taken much longer.
I sometimes describe Fly-By missions as: “have you ever been on holiday, and you want to see as many sights as possible, so your parent won’t even stop the car and just tells you to take a picture so you can get on to the next destination?”
And teams of scientists with the combined light from telescopes around the world have imaged the area around black holes, including the one at the centre of our own Milky Way. You can read more here.
Hi everyone!
I’m Frances, space enthusiast and moderator with my colleagues from Blackrock Castle for this course.
I have loved space since I was tiny – I remember the Mars missions in the 1970s and was fascinated by the idea that we could send missions to the planets.
I was alive when the Apollo missions happened, but don’t remember them at all (I was only 3! in summer 1969).
I just “snopes-ed” my new favourite space fact – and it turns out to be not true at all. https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/michael-collins-scream-cut-mic/
