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Irene – the Universe in Box booklet has many super activities, and the Spherical Earth set is one of my favourite.
Do you have an Earth Ball or will you use a ‘regular Earth globe’?
Observing the Moon is great– it can tie into weather observations – as in — “if it is cloudy in the day, we won’t be able to see the Moon.”
Sarah – Special Life makes a great trigger, and lets the children think about our own planet and what makes it special. “How might other planets be different” – would you look at planets in the solar system? or consider exoplanets? Exoplanets are so far away, that we know very little about most of them. For some, we know their mass, and their distance from their star. This can give us the barest idea if a planet might support life.
The study of exoplanets is still very new — when I was in college, no exoplanets were known – the first one was only discovered in 1992, and the people who discovered the one in 1995 won a Nobel Prize for it in 2019.
Sarah – I like they way you have planned a great trigger – the Sun ball – and how you will use it to get the children to wonder and question. Most children will tell you that you shouldn’t look at the Sun, but this activity with uv beads could leads to the children checking how well the “items would you need for a day in the sun?” actually protect from uv. They might ask and then check: does my T-shirt protect me from the uv? Do my sunglasses protect me from uv …
Irene – in the Materials>Materials and Change strand and strand units, children should
“– explore the effects of heating and cooling on everyday objects, materials and substances (Infants)
— explore the effects of heating and cooling on a range of liquids and solids (1st and 2nd)”I think adding in particle theory for children in junior classes is expecting too much. The animation from https://www.acs.org/content/acs/en/education/resources/k-8/inquiryinaction/second-grade/heating-and-cooling.html refers to molecules and uses quite advanced language. This is something I would have used with students in second level.
There are some nice ideas in the activity, but they need to be adapted for the junior classes.
Sarah – instead of clay, I have used tin foil to make aliens with children. There is a guide here (for Giacometti foil figures) and it is pretty easy to adapt to make into any number of legs/ arms / heads. A 1st class would be well capable of these, and can even start on simple number patterns — 1 rip in the foil makes 2 legs, 2 rips make 3 legs, how many rips make 4 legs?
Great song choice there Sarah – I just played it out loud and got a “what on earth is that?” from the other side of the room!
Research tasks, like finding out about planets, can be inquiry based, particularly if the children choose a question that they would like to answer. Astronomy has always been an observational science. We can look at distant objects, and in the last 50 years have sent spacecraft to have closer looks at some of the nearer objects in our solar system, but we can’t ‘do an experiment’ on a planet! Instead, we ask questions and look for patterns in what we see and try to make predictions about what else we might see.
Hi Ciara – welcome to the course. Please do check the forums – they are rich with shared experiences of the Junior end of the school.
Magnets is a great inquiry topic – since simple ideas can easily be tested — ie “I think all metals are magnetic” – and if the children have a range of metals to test, they very quickly find out that only some metals are attracted to magnets! The trick is then getting them to work that into their own science thinking. I once did this activity with an informal group, and one of the leaders (an adult!) told the children that all metals were magnetic, and then made up some very odd explanation as to why the tinfoil didn’t stick to the magnets.
Teresa – Please can I join you when you do this!! Seriously – we do live links into classrooms during Space Week (the ESERO Space Goes to School programme – this will be updated by end of August with the plans for Space Week) and I’m sure either I or one of my colleagues could Zoom into you to be interviewed about the work we do observing….
Bernadette – now you’ve got me wondering — does the size of the opening of the bottle make a difference to the force the air exerts on the rocket mouse? I’m thinking of water hoses, and how if you narrow the opening you can get a squirt of water that will go across the garden and water the plants that otherwise you wouldn’t reach… I wonder if it is the same for air… and how could we find out?
Patrice, thanks for sharing that video link – I had forgotten that one! I like how it shows the relative sizes of the planets -(ish). I have done an activity on modelling all the planets to scale – but it uses a lot of playdoh! There is a version here for older children, as well as an alternative for the Earth/Moon and for Earth/Moon and Mars.
Marcella – I like the way you have considered how your school context can enrich the learning around this topic. I’d be asking the parents to come in and show pictures of housing typical of where they come from – Canadian houses are usually designed with lots of insulation and roofs that snow can slide off easily!
Marcella – and what if the children were asked — “can you make two constellations that still look the same when viewed above / below ?” I could see that being a real maths stretch for a confident child.
Marcella – your older children might be able to explore how the model of the Moon’s surface is or is not like the actual Moon surface. The nature of the Moon’s surface (the layer called the regolith) was only really sorted once un-manned space craft landed on it.
If you read the transcript of Neil Armstrong’s first moonwalk – he talks about the surface a lot. And this image shows it: https://airandspace.si.edu/multimedia-gallery/as11-40-5918hr-lunar-module-footpad
Nora – I love the way you have brought space across so much of the curriculum, and the music section brought to mind a video I saw (which I can’t find now!) of making a rocket/alien song in a group Each line has a different beat and one section of the group will say/sing each line in the final round.
It’s something like:
rock rock, we’re on a rocket
5…, 4…, 3…, 2, 1 (slow for 5, 4 and 3, then faster for 2, 1)
there’s aliens in space, oh yeah, (high pitch silly voice)and another line I cannot remember.
If anyone else has come across this – please share.
Karen – could you more explicitly explore the link between distance from the Sun and temperature of the planet? This could be linked to the Goldilocks zone / habitable zone. There is also a connection to the greenhouse effect – since Venus, with its thick thick clouds has the highest temperature surface in the solar system, even though Mercury is closer to the Sun. You could explore that with : Earth Under the Lid, an activity for 8-10 year olds.