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Christine – have you seen Chris Hadfield’s photograph book: You Are Here? also described by Chris in this video, check out how lovely Ireland looks!
If the children have family abroad, you might ask them to find that location on a globe – and then ask them – which way up are the people there standing?
Angela – it’s great to use this a skills activity – close observation of its appearance is so valuable. I remember setting this for a class of 12 year olds – and one of them brought in her homework with the Moon drawn as a pie with 1/4 taken out of it. She’d heard the words 1st quarter and 3rd quarter but hadn’t realized that meant how far around the Earth the Moon was in its orbit! I made her observe again the next week!
Fiona, I like how you have centred this on the Sun’s daily motion causing shadows to move. I expect you would then allow plenty of exploration of shadows and how, in Ireland, we sometimes don’t see our shadows clearly due to cloudy weather.
If you have a drawing of a compass – you could make the sundial on the compass!
Nell – you have nicely included maths, PE and music. I know that the science of planets is tricky for young children, but you could include the different colours of the planets, and close observation of photographs (using the See, Think, Wonder approach to thinking skills) to help draw out what they notice and what they think might be different from one planet to another.
Aoife: here is the Moon seen this morning: https://photos.app.goo.gl/vkZHS7rAnuwxCF9Q7
and it will be last quarter around September 17 and again October 17, 2022.
The appearance of the Moon and the different shapes / craters / mare are all interesting to explore, and making a textured surface for the children to see how impacts make craters really lets them test out their understanding.
Do check different types of sand — if you use very fine playground sand, it is often too silky and runs rather than makes craters. You could try some coarser builder’s sand, although when I buy it, it is often very wet and needs to be dried out before use.
Karen – the Planets activity was designed as the first in the 80-strong activity set from ESERO – and is ideally suited for Junior Infants. I agree that having the children physically demonstrate the motion of the planets with the hula hoops can help to bring the solar system to life.
If you wanted to stretch out the activity (literally!) you could ask children to move apart to demonstrate the spacing of the planets in the solar system – this spaceweek.ie resource has the distances.
Hi Claire, can you please check the access to your mind map – it is currently private to yourself.
Gravity and magnets are often compared – they both are attractive forces, although magnetism can also repel.
Be careful with the discussion about “I would start the lesson with a discussion about space and gravity. What happens to astronauts in space?” since a common misconception is that there is no gravity in space – whereas the more correct terminology is to describe the orbiting environment of astronauts on the ISS as being weightless or microgravity. As they orbit, they are falling towards to the Earth at the same speed as the space station – so they don’t feel the space station pushing on them.
Magnetic fields related to the Earth is great to explore, particularly if you can make a compass.
Hi Nell – welcome to the course. There are plenty of 1st class teachers here, so please do check over the forum posts for lots of ideas and suggestions for books/videos and great activities.
I tidied up the formatting in your post – to avoid carrying it over if you have written your post in another document, right click in the forum response box and then choose paste as text.
Your inquiry activity touches on a few areas of science — the idea of light travelling in a straight line, of objects that are opaque vs translucent vs transparent, as well as moving the Sun/light source.
You might want to spread these out over a few lessons and let the children really play with the torches and shadows.
Eilis – you have a lot of concepts in this activity set – how much time do you think this will take? Will you split it across a few weeks?
I have done the modelling the earth-moon-sun with adults and second level students – and it is quite complicated. How would you simplify it for young children, particularly with respect to axial tilt?
I do like the inclusion of the polar day and night – I think that is essential for children to appreciate how the Earth actually does move around the Sun.
Keith – how will you draw out the children’s thinking about the sun and shadows? Would you ask the children to try to model the path of the Sun as they make shadows in the classroom?
Alexandra — by changing ordering the planets you are actually hitting on one of the newer theories about how the solar system formed. Known as the Nice model (for the city in France) it suggest that the outer planets changed positions in the early solar system. It’s just a theory, widely accepted, but with some issues.
Here is the story, read by the author. Planets are an interesting topic for children (and for this astronomy-space mad adult!), but don’t worry if they don’t learn the names of the planets. Knowing that they are different from stars is important, and they only show up as a curriculum learning outcome for 5th and 6th class in Geography.
Eilis – I am sure the idea of teddy weather will be ‘borrowed’ by every teacher on this course — it’s super!
You could explore the clothing range in class to make sure it really is suitable for the weather — does the raincoat keep Teddy dry? Does the sun-hat keep the sun out of Teddy’s eyes….
Georgia – what a lovely maths-centred activity set. Is this the book? https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/20359195-adams-amazing-space-adventure
not the book by our own Adam from the Toy Show who wants to be a CapCom?
