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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….
Do you have a link to the poem? I like the framing for Special Life of the children being tour guides for an alien.
How often do we have visitors ourselves and we wonder where to take them!
Nice outline Aisling — I used to have an excellent image of a bunch of aliens – many borrowed from Dr Who (although that show is too scary for small children)! or from Men in Black. I wonder what the current popular aliens are amongst younger children.
There is a nice science article on what aliens might be like – for an adult audience here: https://theconversation.com/curious-kids-what-would-aliens-be-like-127289,
and ESA’s mascot PAXI is a friendly alien: https://www.esa.int/kids/en/Multimedia/Downloads/Paxi_Posters
I like the way you have connected ideas from a previous module to this theme. Would you include videos of humans in space? Many astronauts make videos while they are aboard the ISS, and you can keep an eye on live broadcasts from astronauts on https://www.nasa.gov/nasalive and https://www.esa.int/ESA_Multimedia/ESA_Web_TV.
Aine – if you know any local patchworkers or quilters, they probably could come in and talk about how they choose fabric for quilts — almost all quilters have a “seasons” quilt in them! See for example this top – made in 1979, at the Museum of Ireland. This says spring to me — with the paler colours and that lovely blue.
Welcome Ruth, there are plenty of other Senior Infants teachers here, so please do look around the forums for lots of ideas and shared experiences.
The water in the stem of two different plants is a nice demo – how will you stretch out the children’s learning? Will they have the chance to wonder and ask their own questions about this? Could they try different lengths or widths of celery and see if the red colour moves differently?
Inquiry should give the children an opportunity to predict what might happen based on their science understanding — so I’d demo this, then let them explore further depending on the questions they have.
There is nothing worse than a class saying ” I get it, I get it” when you ask them if they have any questions — a child that has understood something really well will always have more questions.
Barbara- I like how you have adapted rocket mouse for your infant level children by focusing on the effect of bottle size.
There is lots of opportunity to look at fair testing around this — can the children push the same with a big bottle vs a little bottle? Does the material of the bottle make a difference? I have used the small water bottles with very squishy sides and they are easier to squeeze than the more rigid milk bottles. Different brands of milk bottles also have quite different plastic!
Aoife – the creative side here is just great. Would you try to include the science reasons why their aliens look like they do?
Barbara – for slightly older classes I have had lovely discussions about aliens as shown in movies/films. I ask the children to name and describe an alien that they know of from a film or television – and then I bring up a picture of that alien. We discuss if the alien was made to look that way because it really is a person in a suit — so it has a basic human shape of two arms, two legs, a head etc.
If someone else suggests an alien from an animated show, then we discuss how this lets the alien look completely different from a human – and why.
