Forum Replies Created
-
Posts
-
Michelle – you’ve brought together many strands of the curriculum around this theme, with science threaded through it – great stuff. I’m hunting around for a person who had shared the spacecraft play area she had made with her son – but can’t find the images. I’d love to see what you make with your class this year – please share with us at spaceweek.ie when you can.
Mallorie – there is lovely scope here to connect to actual space missions that are designed to travel through the solar system – in particular ESA’s Solar Orbiter, where an Irish company provided the black coating that was used to help protect it from the intense environment near the Sun. You can read about solar black and John O Donoghue here: https://www.esa.int/Enabling_Support/Space_Engineering_Technology/Paint_it_black_Stone_Age_sunscreen_for_Solar_Orbiter
Claire – with a 2nd class would you also include aspects of seasonal change from SESE: Science – related to plant and animal life? and would you give the children the opportunity to measure and compare temperatures?
Trees that lose their leaves are the obvious connection to autumn (I grew up in Canada where the colour change is striking!) – you can see some images related to this in this ESA education activity: https://www.esa.int/Education/Teachers_Corner/One_year_on_Earth_-_Understanding_seasons_Teach_with_space_PR45
thanks for sharing the video links – I love finding new songs about the planets. This autumn it will be quite easy to see Jupiter and Saturn when it gets dark in September/October/November/December and at Christmas-time we’ll even be able to see Mercury and Venus as well. This will make news, so I’d suggest trying to include Planets as a theme before Christmas, or straight afterwards.
Katie – could you time this to let the children observe the Moon during school time? The 3rd quarter phase of the Moon is visible in the morning, and in September at 3rd quarter it is particularly high in the sky at its highest, so easy to see.
The Moon can be seen easily without binoculars or telescopes – and Stellarium can be used to show a Zoomed in view of the Moon for those possibly cloudy days!
Michelle – I think there would be the opportunity to look at how the Sun appears in the sky from the Arctic/Antarctic. Stellarium could be used to show that there is no Sun in the sky for 6 months of the year, and then once it rises at the equinox, it doesn’t set for another 6 months. Some children might ask – if it is daytime all the time, why is it so cold – and this could lead on to an investigation about weather and the Sun.
Marie- I’ve found the same thing, the fine motor skills of the straw rocket are demanding. There is a variant where you use a single strip of paper and tape it length-wise around the pencil – that might be a bit easier. The guide for the variant suggest checking stability of the paper rocket by dropping it from a horizontal position onto the floor – if the nose hits the floor first, then it is stable.
Lots of applications to darts and how they fly!
Aliens can be a very fun topic — and an imaginative one since we haven’t yet found evidence of alien life. A mathematical consideration for teachers is that even if the chance of life developing on a planet is 1 in a million, there are 100 thousand million stars in our Milky Way — so the chances of life elsewhere are huge!
Esa recently had a contest for children to create an alien – check out one of the winners!
Ruth – you have connected across so many curriculum areas, great stuff. Remember that for SESE Geography infants need only to “identify and discuss the sun, the moon and stars ” so integration with other curriculum over a broad topic like “The Planets” is perfect.
Don’t forget to have a count-down to launch when playing the planets hoolahoop game!
Marie – would you use ICT – such as Stellarium to show the children the constellations and possible art interpretations of the constellations?
get the children to make different constellations using battery operated tea lights.
Can you say a little more about how you would do this? does each tea light represent one star? would children have a set of say 8 and arrange them differently for others to look at and imagine what shape it might be?
I saw one suggestion of having the lights at different distances and asking if we can tell which star is nearer or further just from looking at them.
What a super set of activities there Marie – so much scope for the children to explore and play!
Arctic dens is an interesting idea, given the lack of trees and large scale plant materials in the arctic. There is some background information and great images here: https://www.worldwildlife.org/places/arctic (US site)
and here: https://polarpedia.eu/en/ (European site),
At each station the children can ask their own questions and carry out their own inquiries with the materials available. I wonder myself, if more vaseline makes you more waterproof and warm, or if just any amount is good enough…. I wonder how I could find out….
