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This sounds like a really engaging lesson Gillian. The children would have lots of fun testing the various materials and designing their rockets, then racing them at the end. I think this would work well as a group activity.
I would choose the Rockets activity set with my class. To engage the class with the topic I would read the story Aliens in Underpants Save the World. This is a humorous story to get the children excited about the topic. To explore the topic further we would create our own rocket mice and paper rockets and have some fun testing how high they go. I will encourage the children to think of their own investigation question after the exploration stage, for example “does a bigger rocket fly higher?” We will then make our predictions and conduct our investigation. I will encourage the children to ensure it is a fair test e.g. the same material is used each time. We will then return to our starter question to interpret the results – did the bigger rocket fly higher? Why? We will then discuss how this applies to sports – compare a tennis ball and soccer ball, which goes higher when kicked? What else might affect how high the ball goes? This would be a fun follow-on activity for PE. We could then place some space-themed games.
I completely agree Adam, first class still love a hands-on approach to learning. The balloon rockets experiment sounds like great fun
I would use the Hot and Cold activity from the Esero downloadable resources with an infant classroom. I really like this activity because it involves spending time outdoors. Firstly, we would have a whole class discussion about hot and cold, sun and shade, summer and winter. How does it affect us, our clothes and activities? How does it affect animals and plant life? We would then begin our experiment. Children will predict whether the ice cube will melt faster in the sun or shade. After recording our results we will investigate outside. I will encourage the children to ensure both ice cubes are identical (beginning our understanding of a fair test.) We will discuss our results. We could also test the speed of the ice cube melting in summer vs winter. As a follow on maths lesson for older children we could graph our results. I also really like the story scenarios as a conclusion to the activity where children must decide whether it is hot or cold.
This is a great activity to use with Senior Infants. Children are already so interested in the stars and would love creating their own constellation. This would be a fantastic fine motor activity for infants to stick on the stickers and draw with crayons.
To teach about stars, space and aliens; I would use the Mars “design a Martian” activity. This is a very creative activity that lends itself to visual arts, music and drama. Firstly, the children would brainstorm all of the fun and wacky ways a Martian might differ from an earthling. As part of a literacy creative writing class, we would write a class story about Life on Mars. They would design a 2D Martian using paper and colours. Then we would use play doh or modelling clay to create our 3D Martian. Using an app called stop motion, we could bring our Life on Mars story to life. This involves taking multiple pictures and putting it together to make a moving animation. We could also act out our story in a drama lesson. The children absolutely love using their imagination through creative writing and designing and would also enjoy presenting their final pieces. I would encourage the children to use their scientific skill of interpreting the results at the end. How do the Martians compare/ contrast to humans? Why do think that is?
I also chose the moon topic for the same reasons as you Sarah. The moon has always been a fascinating topic in the classroom. I never thought of investigating the different multicultural myths and stories about the moon before and will definitely try that this year. There are some lovely art activities related to the moon too.
I’m particularly interested in the activity set about “the moon” because it is adaptable to a variety of age groups and grade levels. This is topical because of the recent rare occurrence of the solar eclipse when the moon passed between earth and the sun and obscured our view of the sun. There was so much excitement about this on the news which would be a great way to introduce the topic. For a younger class, I would use the storybook “Goodnight Moon” to introduce the topic. To investigate what the moon looks like, we would brainstorm words about the moon as a class using think pair share and a word web on the board. We would predict how the moon will look at different times of the day and why that might be. We would draw pictures of how the moon looks at different stages of the day in our investigation journals and then continue after school for homework. Finally, we would discuss our findings. I would then encourage the children to think about what the surface of the moon might be like and how humans could walk on it. Depending on the children’s interests and grade , we might research about man walking on the moon.
Hi Karl, this is a great idea for an experiment. The pupils would also love an art activity designing their parachute.
I really like the inquiry based activity to test materials for water absorbency. It can be easily adapted from junior infants to second class by changing the prompt and language used to suit the class level and interests. I did a similar experiment with senior infants where we had to create a new waterproof coat for Paddington bear. The prompt was “Paddington needs a new coat.” We predicted which materials would absorb the water and which would disintegrate. We had great fun and then extended our learning through art by designing a coat. For an older class, I would enforce the need to test with the same amount of water each time to ensure a fair test. I would also extend their learning by discussing what materials could be used as a lining to keep Paddington warm. There are great opportunities to use maths measuring skills too to create the coat.
