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Niamh these ideas are amazing! I am definitely hoping to use some of them in the coming year as I will also have Junior Infants.
I would use the Activity Set: The Planets in my class.
To begin, I would introduce the planets to the class. I would use visual aids and the IWB to display pictures on the different plants and how they differ from one another. I would tell the children the names of each of the planets and chose 8 individual children to stand at the top of the room. Each of these children would be given a label with the name of a different planet on it. The class would work to put the children in the correct order of the planets (the order could be displayed on the IWB in the background to assist them). I would then play ‘The Planets song’. We would listen to it twice and I would ask the children to join in with it. I would then go on to play The Planet Game with the children on the IWB for a few minutes. We would then finish the lesson with The Planet Dance.
I love this idea Laura. I did something similar with my class last year except we used our own shadows and drew them in the yard at 3 different times during the school day. The children were so fascinated how although we were standing in the same marked spot each time, the location of our shadows had changed as the Earth had moved.
An inquiry based approach I would take to a lesson with Junior Infants would be demonstrating how the Earth orbits the sun using our own shadows.
I would start the lesson with a question – do we think that the Earth spins slowly or stands still. Children use the think/pair/share to come up with their answers and reasons as to why. I will then explain to them how the Earth moves very slowly everyday around the sun which is why we have day and night.
Each child would be provided with a piece of chalk on a sunny day. We would head out to the yard three times on that specific day for example at; 9am, 11am and 1pm. The children would each be given a specific space on the yard and they would have to draw their own shadows. They would do this three times in one given day at the times mentioned above and it would show them how their shadow has moved as the sun has moved during the day.I did a lesson very similar to this with my Junior Infant class last year Aoife. The children were engaged in the lesson instantly when we opened it with the song ‘Twinkle Twinkle Little Star’. We then went on to speak about the stars and I shared some basic facts about them. The children were so interested and fascinated by the idea of stars being so huge and so far away. We spoke about the shape of stars and how bright they are too. We also finished our lesson with the children decorating, designing and cutting out their own stars that we stuck onto large black paper to create our own Space Wall.
I have Junior Infants again in the coming school year so I hope to do the same lesson with them as it was so engaging for them.
Hello everyone,
My name is Laura and I have been teaching Junior Infants for the past three years and will teach them again this coming September.
Space has always been one of my favourite topics to teach the Infants over the years. One Space fact that I find interesting is that driving a car to the nearest star at 70 mph would take more than 356 billion years! I just find the vastness of Space so interesting and so hard to comprehend.
