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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/
Eilis – I like how you have taken modelling first, then asked the children to use their model to predict real world behaviour- and then they can verify — absolutely the essence of learning science through inquiry!
Maura, great that you identified the needs of your class and planned active movement to suit them.
All this exploration and wondering can lead to specific questions that can be investigated, and those questions might come from the children, or from yourself – as you pick up on the discussions that they might be having as they explore and play.
Síle – this is a simple activity, but it is so effective. I was watching my shadow this morning – it was extremely long at sunrise, and I was thinking that in winter, with the later sunrise, this would be very effective to explore with children during school hours.
John – what activity on eclipses would you carry out? There is an ESERO activity for older classes that has the children model the Earth-Sun-Moon system. Just watch out for the small error on the names of the phases of the Moon (and bear in mind, phases of the Moon are not required in primary).
John – for a science inquiry activity for junior classes, the emphasis is very much on the children posing a question, predicting what they think the answer is, based on their own science understanding and then verifying that answer with a research or practical activity.
This discussion could form the exploration part of an inquiry – and then the children might explore how water being a liquid depends on the temperature at that place.
Emily – try to keep the emphasis on why the Moon looks like this – rather than learning the names of the various phases etc. Infants are expected to “identify and discuss the sun, the moon and stars” and 1st/2nd class “identify the sun, the moon, stars” and phases of the Moon appears in second level.
Séamus – you can use the simple picture from the ISS education kit to check that the children have really gotten the idea about gravity pulling everything into the planet. See page 12.