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Hi Laura,
I love this space fact, and even more the riff on it from the science cartoon XKCD “What If?“
Hi Kate,
If the sun is moving too quickly
if we get a sunny day this week run outside and see how fast the Sun moves. I’ve found that you just about have time to get a full chalk drawing of a person before the Sun has moved enough that they don’t fit into their own shadow.
Depending on what is in your school grounds, children could place cones to mark the shadow of a tree – and for older children this could be linked to the directions South, East and West and how this shows us the time of day.
Sinead,
I like how you have consolidated several of the ideas of this module into a coherent plan for your class. All we need is a sunny day! This might be a good thing to have in your planner and if the Sun cooperates, outside you go to play with your shadow!
Ursula,
I really like the CBeebies clip you have found, really nice at showing the stars and it connects so nicely with the rest of the star activities you have planned.
Hold onto this lesson plan and do it in Space Week this year – I’m sure it would be a hit!
Saoirse,
I think the images from Lots and Lots of Stars might be worth sharing, but not the full document.
Other beautiful night sky images can be found at ESO.
I like to share ESO images since many of them were taken with ground based telescopes, but images from Hubble or Webb may also be suitable.
Great stuff Eleanor.
Don’t forget to paste as plain text to avoid the extra formatting coming through.
Kate,
would this work for Junior Infants? Are there specific websites or videos that you would recommend for them to use as resources?
There is a lovely way to engage the children around the question of the weather on Venus – developed by Dr Elizabeth Tasker of JAXA. She compares Venus to a person who is in the Sahara (where it is hot) but is wearing a thick coat (the atmosphere of Venus is really thick!). This could be linked to the children’s coats and how their coats should be chosen with weather in mind. Curious Minds explores this more fully with “Investigating Children’s Coats” in English and Irish.
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.
