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Susie,
I found the book here: https://annabelleandaiden.com/product/how-we-found-the-earth-is-round/.
The interview with the author here gives a sense of the book.
The Eratosthenes experiment gets carried out each year – you can find an archive of past measurements here: https://eratosthenes.eu/wordpress/. For a senior class or second level!
Time zones are tricky for most people to get their heads around – I’m sure most of us have been woken up by a family member in another country getting the time wrong!
Susie,
in this module we have introduced the Framework for Inquiry as a guide for inquiry in Irish classrooms.
The structure of Engage / Investigate / take the Next Step and then Reflect can be used to centre the learning on the child, with their own science understanding being improved and consolidated through the inquiry steps.
If you have stations set up, a shared prompt through a picture book (see the many suggested ones here: https://www.spaceweek.ie/wp-content/uploads/2021/09/SpaceWeekJunior-1.pdf) can be ideal to engage the children.
I’d choose open ended activities, and perhaps share ‘task descriptors’ that give the children the method to make a thing, and let them then explore their understanding through play.
We will meet rockets in Module5, planets in Module2, stars in Module3, so you may want to incorporate some of those specific activities into this plan.
Thanks for the book recommendation Audrey,
is it this one: Can You See The Stars Tonight – Anna Terreros-Martin
https://youtu.be/PuldpLYMteY?si=Wi6wibkUdSZZ8LX2
She only read the first part of the book, and it was mostly about lost puffins! Does the rest of the book get into constellations?
I’m slightly unsure about not being able to see the Moon due to light pollution – that is some very bad light pollution!!
With the day and night activity, would you have an overlap area for objects that can be seen both in the day and in the night? (like the Moon).
Aoife,
thanks for the book recommendation. I’m not familiar with it, but see that Cork County Council Library service has it as one of their borrowable books:
The Emperor’s Egg by Martin Jenkins – 10 copies
Can you imagine being a male emperor penguin and standing around in the freezing cold with an egg on your feet for two months. Welcome to the story of the world’s most devoted dad!There are Humboldt Penguins at Fota, and Fota shared this workbook with images about them: https://www.fotawildlife.ie/wp-content/uploads/2021/05/HumboldtPenguinWorkbook.pdf
Interestingly – none of the adaptations they list are to do with being in a cold climate!
Reading about the Penguins at Fota, I discovered that there are penguins on the Galapagos, which is at the equator. This could be very interesting ‘next step’ as the children test how a penguin might be different in a much warmer climate.
https://galapagosconservation.org.uk/galapagos-penguin-facts/
In the discussion that you propose, would their be the opportunity for the children to test their ideas? They might wonder how thick fur or feathers can help keep something that is warm warm, or something that is cold, cold. They could try changing number of layers of a jumper around their hand and does their hand stay warm?
Claire,
would you run the weather chart all year? I think it would take more than a week or two to see different seasons.
Which season dates would you teach? I have learnt to use the Irish ones since I have lived here, and it bugs me (a bit) that Met Eireann don’t!
https://www.met.ie/meteorological-spring-begins-wednesday-1st-march-2023
I like how they state:
Is it 1st March or the Vernal Equinox or St Brigid’s Day the start of Spring?
In Ireland, it’s all of them.
While the first day of meteorological spring is 1st March each year.
Audrey,
the mnemonic of ‘my very educated easy method just speeds up naming planets’ is great for the order from the Sun, but if you have started with the order of size, then you would use:
My method very educated naming up speeds just! ( I left out dwarf planet Pluto).
Would you look at drawing the orbits even slightly to scale, or just as circles?
There are scale solar system details in this resource from spaceweek.ie:
https://www.spaceweek.ie/wp-content/uploads/2020/08/Solar-System-Walk.pdf
Claire,
what a fun prompt! Stories that the children are familiar with can serve such a great purpose. How do you test the “blow your house down?”
Do you have a hair dryer that you use so that there is the same force each time? There could be a nice link to fair testing in this activity, particularly if you demonstrated blowing the house down with the wolf giving only a tiny puff to one house and bigger puff to another!
Hi Mike,
there is a STEM activity based on physical activity like an astronaut. It was designed for slightly older children, but could be adapted for younger classes.
You can find it as Mission X, Train Like an Astronaut, and a summary pdf is here: https://www.stem.org.uk/system/files/elibrary-resources/2020/12/English_all%20activities.pdf
With the Olympics this summer, astronauts on the ISS have been doing space Olympics again! Here they are in 2021: https://www.esa.int/ESA_Multimedia/Videos/2021/08/Space_Olympics_full_video
and this summer:
https://youtu.be/ycDoaIn6wuk?si=uyib_AXynFzF08QH
Irene,
those “I wonder..” and “what if..” are so useful with inquiry activities. The children should feel that their ideas are valuable and can be tested, and that they don’t need to keep checking with teacher if they are ‘right’.
I like the discussion on staying afloat as the next step – so relevant to the many of us who live near the coast or on a river.
Rachael,
is this the song?
https://youtu.be/KQk3l3fSsOE?si=lTfnmWJyIYN0Gn53
The planets give lots of opportunity to combine maths and science, particularly around space, shape and measure (compare and order).
Rachael,
I’m not familiar with tinfoil rockets (except for these positively dangerous ones! https://www.grc.nasa.gov/www/k-12/TRC/Rockets/match_rocket.html or here: https://www.sciencebuddies.org/stem-activities/matchstick-rockets)
How would you launch the rockets? I like measuring how far they go – with a straw paper rocket my best record is about 8 m, but that included a glide on a smooth floor. The raw distance to landing is about 6m.
Hi Laura,
making those comparisons is fun. I sometimes ask second level students roughly how big they think the world is.
We start from – how long does it take a plane to get to Australia- which is half way around the world. They say – about a day or 24 hours. (ish)
Then I ask – how far does a plane go in an hour (ish). If they don’t know (and they usually don’t) we break it down to – if you took a plane from Cork to Dublin, how long would it take once you were in the air – and how far is Dublin – so that’s roughly the speed of an airplane.
It’s all very ish. Then we look at going to the Moon, since the Moon is 30 Earth diameters away (or 10 circumferences), so if it takes a day to get to Australia in a plane, it will take 20 days to get to the Moon (ish).
If you want to look at a bigger comparison table:
Michelle,
Marvin and Milo are great – after a bit of hunting I found that you can search by age:
Unfortunately it only returns one page of activities.
Erika,
by shape of stars are you referring to how they are represented in culture?
I’m not clear, since your opener is about stars in the sky?
It is interesting that the brighter stars seem to twinkle, so giving a “star shape”
You can read a little about it from my colleague Niall: https://www.irishexaminer.com/lifestyle/outdoors/arid-41257189.html
However, stars are spheres!
Would the “star-shaped dot patterns” be of random dots, so allowing constellations to be made, or of a star made from dots?
All constellations are described here: https://www.iau.org/public/themes/constellations/
Niamh,
when we talk about “inquiry-based activities” in this course, we are specifically referencing the Framework for Inquiry that is outlined in this module.
So, your planet exploration can be based on a prompt – what is it like to live on another planet (would you make it just our solar system – or consider some of the vastly different types of worlds that have been discovered around other stars? – if you did, then the ExoPlanet posters could make a great prompt).
Children should then share what they currently understand and share their questions as they wonder and explore. Then they can structure a starter question, make a prediction based on science about that starter, then investigate to check if their science is a good model. The next step might be “what animals might live there” or some other ‘thoughtful action’.
If you do want to include art, you might look at adapting this resource (on how features of art are connected to science) https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/edu/teach/activity/art-the-cosmic-connection/
