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I recently brought my nephew to Explorium and the thing that excited us both so much was launching the rockets so that’s what I will focus on today as I want to bring that excitement to my own classroom.
I would start this lesson by sparking the children’s curiosity with videos of rockets blasting into space from youtube. I would ascertain the children’s PRK about rockets through talk and discussion.
Then we would work in pairs to create rockets using different materials like paper and tinfoil.
We would bring the rockets outside and launch them and combining maths we would measure how far they travelled using a metre stick/trundle wheel and we would observe and record the results. We would discuss why some travelled further than others. We would finish off by drawing a diagram of our rockets to complete the lesson and decorate them (incorporating art).
I really liked the “Animals in the Cold” lesson and would incorporate sensory play by placing penguins and polar bears in water and freezing them. I would set up these animals on a tuff tray and using water spray/water bottles, little tools the children would free the animals. We would then play with the animals as small world play and these could be two aistear stations. I think this would also be a good lead in to teaching about weather and on a very basic level lead the conversation in the direction of the ice caps melting.
On a separate note I absolutely love Astronomy picture of the day and have done for years since my uncle introduced me to it. I never thought about using it in the classroom!
I love the idea of drawing the shadows. The children would really love this and pay more attention to shadows and how they change
Using a thematic approach in Infants I would teach/recap on the nursery rhyme twinkle twinkle little star. Depending on the time of year we would look at the phonics within the word star, be that the “s” sound or looking at “ar”. I would use the “Seeing Star” activity to make the plough constellation with the children. We would also combine art and paint pictures of different consellations, after explain what the word constellation is and showing different pictures of different constellations. In terms of maths, we would focus on day and night, the difference and activities we do in both (cutting and pasting).
The activity I would choose would be the planets. I would introduce the concept by playing “Story Bots We are the Planets” for the children.
Then I would move on to the crux of the lesson, using the ESRO worksheets and activities to teach the children about the different planets. Combining with art and aistear we would use group work to create papier machier planets to display in the classroom. I would use cutting and sticking and playdough making of planets in aistear stations also to reinforce. We would also use the planet dance in PE.
I would also use the Blues Clues planet song to teach the children.
Hi, my name is Rachael and I’m working in a junior school as a SET teacher. I think it’s cool that worms have 5 hearts! We do a lot of Math and Literacy based in class so a lot of the time I’m combining Math and Science lessons together.
My favourite inquiry based lesson to do in school and at home is floating and sinking. An oldie, a classic but you can elicit so much from the children and they usually have a lot of previous knowledge on the topic because of water play in the infants classrooms. I like to introduce this by talking about different objects and predicting if they’re going to float or sink and discussing the language of floating and sinking, like what does it actually mean. I usually bring in the kid’s experiences of swimming in the discussion. We observe and investigate what happens when the children place different classroom items in the water like rubbers, rulers all different materials and heavy and light items. We’ll discuss our findings and take note of them. Usually we would watch a video at the end to sum up our findings.Hi, my name is Rachael and I’m working in a junior school as a SET teacher. I think it’s cool that worms have 5 hearts! We do a lot of Math and Literacy based in class so a lot of the time I’m combining Math and Science lessons together.
My favourite inquiry based lesson to do in school and at home is floating and sinking. An oldie, a classic but you can elicit so much from the children and they usually have a lot of previous knowledge on the topic because of water play in the infants classrooms. I like to introduce this by talking about different objects and predicting if they’re going to float or sink and discussing the language of floating and sinking, like what does it actually mean. I usually bring in the kid’s experiences of swimming in the discussion. We observe and investigate what happens when the children place different classroom items in the water like rubbers, rulers all different materials and heavy and light items. We’ll discuss our findings and take note of them. Usually we would watch a video at the end to sum up our findings.
