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Lovely lesson Laura – I like the idea of one of the plants being set up next to a speaker playing music. It’s so important to test their ideas and encourage learning through inquiry, even if you know it won’t make a difference.
Nice lesson Regina – this is very similar to making marble runs. We do this at Blackrock Castle with children using cut up foam pipes as ramps. They work very well with marbles because you can adjust the curve/angle they are at easily and tape them together as much as you like. They may not be the best surface for a toy car though.
Lovely lesson Sarah – we do a nice activity with children at Blackrock Castle that we call ‘Silly Robot’ that is really great for getting them thinking and using descriptive language around forces. You pretend that you are a silly robot that doesn’t know or understand very much english and you take everything very literally. You tell the children you want to move something, a chair for example, across the room and ask them how to do it. They will immediately begin telling you to push it, or move it. You say you don’t know what pushing is, and they tell you where to put your hands etc. It’s very fun and the children are usually so engaged in getting you to understand what they mean, especially when you continuously misinterpret their directions.
Sarah – nice lesson. I would be a bit careful with explicitly saying that heavy things sink and light things float. This might be a little misleading because a lump of playdough would sink for example, but if it were to be molded into a boat shape, it would float.
Really nice work Sean – I like how you highlight working with colleagues and setting school wide targets. Consistency is key!
Nice work Jenny – a good addition would be incorporating the planet the aliens live on to what the aliens look like. For example if the children say that the planet is cold, maybe their aliens are covered in fur to keep warm.
LEGO is such a great building tool for children, if only it weren’t so expensive!
Marvin and Milo is so lovely, and the at home experiments use such normal/accessible materials that I agree it would be great change from regular homework.
Interesting lesson idea Eleanor – I hadn’t thought of doing this as an inquiry lesson but I do think it would be really enjoyable. This could help explain why the sky is blue to them too, or how white light is made up of a spectrum of colours.
Some lovely ideas here Eleanor. The weather and clothes is a great topic to incorporate into Irish and I really like the guessing dress up activity you describe.
Outdoor learning can be so engaging and fun for children. It’s a shame our weather doesn’t allow it as much as we would like. Although, it could be interesting to do this on a partially cloudy day to see if they notice that the clouds can occasionally block the Sun too.
Hi Chloe – rockets can be such a a great topic for engaging children. For an inquiry based lesson however, be careful with giving them a task that can have a wide range of answers or is open ended. You want to focus on a clear question, followed by a hands on investigation that allows them to learn and draw conclusions by themselves.
This is a really lovely use of the KWL chart and think-pair-share activity. Lots of children know so much amount about space and stars, you’d be surprised!
Hi Catriona, so good to hear that visiting us at Blackrock Castle inspired you to take the course. We love to hear it!