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Home is a very informative and engaging documentary that highlights the beauty of our planet and shows how human activities can affect the environment. It encourages us to think about how we can all help to protect the Earth.
With a Junior Infant class, I would introduce these ideas in a way they would understand. I would begin by asking the children what they already know about looking after our planet and discuss simple ways we can care for the environment, like a KWL chart. I would use short video clips and pictures to explore how weather, animals and nature can be affected. Then we would brainstorm small actions we can take, such as recycling, saving water and not littering. The children could then create simple posters with drawings and labels to encourage others to help look after our world.
Like many others, I would also use Activity 3 with my Junior Infants by first introducing the key weather vocabulary using picture cards, actions and songs. After watching the video, I would ask the children to identify familiar and new weather words and match them to pictures.
Before the activity, we would discuss how predictions are based on patterns we have noticed, using our class weather chart as an example. The children could then work in small groups to use Teal to make a prediction and record it using drawings, pictograms, labels or simple sentences.
Each group could present their poster as a short weather report to the class. As a follow up, we could compare our predictions with the actual weather the next day/the coming week and update our class weather chart to help the children recognise patterns over time.this is a great idea and something you could use with any class, making it real life and hands on as they can do a weather report based on real time!
Your Weather Detectives idea sounds absolutely brilliant for an infant class. I find that infants in my experience are obsessed with the weather anyway, especially if there’s a chance of snow or big puddles, so making them official detectives is a fantastic hook. Keeping track of the daily weather, messing around with thermometers, and building those giant picture or Lego graphs is exactly the kind of lesson they would love!
STEM is everywhere lately, but trying to force every single letter of the acronym into an infant lesson is not very realistic for me. I’m going to start using the Engineering Design Process (EDP) as my intro instead. For Junior and Senior Infants “Think it, Make it, Fix it.” If we focus on hands-on problem solving like building a bridge for a toy car, the science and maths bits will just fall into place during their play.
Lesson 1: Weather vs. Climate To start I’ll use a KWL chart on the board, mostly using pictures and doodles since they’re still learning to read. I love the birthday idea to explain the difference between weather and climate. It makes a big concept easier to understand and grasp for a 5-year-old:
“What kind of coat do you usually have to wear on your birthday every year? That’s the climate. What is the sky doing right outside our window this very second? That’s the weather.”
Lesson 2: Graphing and Assembly Using a graph at the end would support this because infants need to actually see data. We’ll make a giant, colorful picture graph together using Lego bricks or stickers to show our results, making it hands on and something they will remember!