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Detail how light pollution is impacting your local area and how you would engage your learners to explore this.
In my schools locality there are lots of street lights, house lights and there are two large football and rugby stadium with regular matches using floodlights. This can be impacting the area be distracting birds to fly the wrong direction or stay awake when they should be resting. The area has a bat population which could decline further due to the lights being too bright for insects which are a main food source for bats.I would have the pupils survey the type of streetlight being using and write to the local council to change to a warmer coloured light and put shades on the street light so they shone downwards and are only lighting the necessary areas. I would have the pupils take pictures or tally how many stars/planets they can see over a fortnight period when we know there are matches being played in the stadiums and see does it affect our ability to see the dark skies and it’s stars and planets.
How lucky your students are to live in a place with little light pollution!! The night time walk is a beautiful idea.
Consider how many Songs / Poems /Art can you think of to connect us with the Night Sky? For example: Look up President Michael D Higgins’ “Stardust”.
W.B. Yeats “He wishes for the Cloths of Heaven” evokes the connecting lights of night along with themes of love and vulnerability that comes with being outside at night time under the night sky.
“The Wild Swans of Coole” is a beautiful lyrical poem by W.B. Yeats also. It explores the beautiful time of year- autumn where leaves are changing colour and birds are emigrating to warmer climates. Swans in particular are gliding under the autumnal twilight.
A song that evokes a sense of shadowed skies at dusk/dawn for me is ” Foggy Dew”. It also links beautifully to Irish history and the 1916 Easter Rising which links back in with our local area and park where we will be doing our bird watching, leaf/plant tallying as the roads are all named after prominent figures of 1916 such as Pearse Road, Kent Road and Connolly Road.
John O’Grady is a wonderful Irish artist who has painted beautiful art such as “Brendan and the Stars” and “Night Sky Over Bunclody”.I love the idea of a moth trap and how you would use this information to campaign for better lighting measures. Hopefully it will start a change in your area.
How you would engage your learners to explore biodiversity in your local area and
the possible impacts of light pollution on local biodiversity.My school is an urban DEIS 1 school. We are lucky to have multiple parks in the area as well as the Lough which is a hub of biodiversity with flora and fauna.
I would split my 3rd/4th class into pairs and give each pair a clipboard with a mini beast recording sheet. They would each have a magnifying glass and record what they find around the school grounds first and then we would move to the local park the following week.
We would do the same with trees and plants with each pupils having a leaf and plant identification sheet to tick off. We would gather some leaves and do leaf rubbings and sketching back in the school.
A bird spotting walk to The Lough and around it using class made ‘binoculars’ and identify common birds such as robins, blackbirds, swans and ducks.
We would have a class discussion on how light pollution affects the plants, animals etc we identified. I would use an example of how a bat going from the Lough to a dark shed might get disorientated if there was a match on in Turners Cross or Musgrave Park and the floodlights were on.
I love how you have the starting point of the CSO information and how it relates directly to the pupils area. Using that fact and starting a discussion on how the pupils could maybe reduce the light pollution, even writing a letter/email to a local councillor would be a great activity too!
I love how your building on their curiosity and developing their sense of exploring and observing our skies!
Create an observing plan for autumn that shows which planets are visible in the evening sky.
For the evening sky in September, Jupiter rises early and shines brightly. I would start by having pupils track just Jupiter in September. Pupils can take a photo and email to the class account or sketch the sky.
October; pupils will continue to track Jupiter and now also add in Saturn which should be visible to the east-southeast soon after sunset. To the southwest they can observe Venus which should be low and bright also shortly after sunset.
If a pupil has binoculars they may see Uranus and Neptune.
In November Jupiter will be even brighter and more prominent and rise earlier each evening. Venus will be brighter in the western sky as well as Saturn after sunset.
My template/plan for the pupils would be similar to this’
PLANET SEPTEMBER OCTOBER NOVEMBER
Jupiter Evening high&bright bright all evening
Venus not visible after sunset SW low bright, rising each night
Saturn visible east-southeast less bright- visible after sunset
Uranus
Neptune
Having taught in Autism classes for over 10 years, your pre teaching and hands on approach should work very well. Also allowing for errors with maybe a social story on how mistakes are and opportunity for learning and possibly introducing a reward system for those that ‘figure out’ if something needs changing or making suggestions for which materials would work best might help if you have any pupils who find making mistakes difficult and may be perfectionists.
Relating how weight differs on earth and in space by using real life favourite things and reducing their weight by 1/6 may also engage pupils further as it would be more relevant to them and things they enjoy.
Plan how your students could “observe and record the positions of the sun when rising and setting and at different times of the day”.
I would start with a safety debrief and inform students to never look directly at the sun. Use of safe methods such as observing shadows, directions and the suns position in the sky relevant to landmarks.
I would give the student a template for home and one for school. We would revise compass positions and focus on east and west.
As they will not be in school for sunrise or sunset I would get permission from our principal/BOM to observe the CCTV cameras from morning and evenings and have the pupils record the position of the sun in school from the footage of that.
We would use the position of the school yard with a fixed point of the basketball pole/hoop which will also be used to record the shadow.
I think going outside twice in the school day, once mid morning and once before home time would be best as the suns position would have moved more obviously.
Students will sketch the horizon and mark the suns position relative to the school building/ their home.
I would do this over a fortnight in October as the sunrise/sunset times shorten significantly. Set times would be 8am at home, 9am observe CCTV for sun at school @8am, 11am, 2pm and at home 7pm.
Once the fortnight recordings are completed by students, we would present our findings at assemble and use a torch and globe to model to the other pupils how the Earth’s rotation causes sunrises and sunsets.