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This sounds like a fantastic space week. I love how you have integrated the theme across the curriculum. the children will truly be excited to come to school and engage with this.
I know all of the children in my class will love the topic of rockets so I will take that as my focus for this lesson.
In previous lessons we will have discussed space and through our play and exploration will will have learnt the necessary language.
we have toy rockets on our classroom so while playing with the rockets i will ask the children -why does it not fly? Hopefully the answer will be -because its a toy.
Maybe we could make our own rockets?
I will have a balloon rocket set up to go in the classroom and allow the children to see it fly across the room. Unfortunately as the children are so young they cannot blow up a balloon and would struggle to carry out the steps necessary to make their own balloon rocket.
Because of this I have decided to go with the mouse rockets. I will give the children different sized bottles and some sparkly paper etc to decorate them. Then I will provide pre made mouse rockets(as again they’d struggle to make them themselves) and we can play with blasting them off. In my experience all children love a countdown so we will countdown from 5. -lets see whose rocket can go the highest? A great opportunity to introduce the maths language higher, lower, faster, slower? we can also experiment with squeezing our bottles softly or really hard to introduce the concept of cause and effect.
We discuss the weather every day in our classroom. we sing a song to that days leader.
Go to the window, go to the window.
Look outside, look outside.
How is the weather? How is the weather?
Please tell us.
The child then tells us what the weather is like, chooses the appropriate weather card and sticks it to weekly chart.
To extend this I will ask the children to chose from 3 coats, a winter coat, raincoat and light jacket to pick the most suitable for that days weather.
I can then show them a weather card for a different type of weather and see if we can match all the coats to the different types of weather.
Finally I’ll ask , how do we keep warm in cold weather. Hopefully they will identify that we wear our warm clothes. we can then dress our dolls in different outfits and discuss what weather the outfits will be suitable for.
This leads into a lesson for the following day/week on how do animals keep warm. Using the pictures of the penguin and polar bear, we can discuss how the weather is where they live and read our books on Penguins and polar bears such as The emperor’s Egg and Big Bear Little Bear.
I plan to use the stars and aliens activities in my Early Start classroom. the song twinkle twinkle little star is a good introduction followed by a discussion on planets. I will follow this up with a drama/dance activity where we climb into our rockets and fly to different planets, as we exit our rockets we realise each planet is different and we act out how it feels. some planets are windy some bouncy others are very hot or very cold. The final planet will have an alien living on it. The children can decide if it is a friendly alien or a frightening alien.
Afterwards we can discuss and expand on the alien. What does it look like? what does it eat? who are its friends? what is the planet it lives on like?
I would follow this up with each child drawing their alien and then creating a model with play dough.
Watching the Peppa pig episode is a great introduction. I will also use this as I think it would be perfect with my early start children.
I will use the song, the Planets to initially engage the children with the topic.
I will introduce the concept of shadows by reading the children the story of Moon Bears Shadow.
On a sunny day we will go outside and observe our shadows as we move around the yard.
Afterwards we can discuss, what caused the shadows? when the children identify that it was the sun we can explore what other light sources might create a shadow. then we can introduce torches for play and exploration.
During our daily discussion on the weather we can introduce the concept of day and night activities and watch the Paxi cartoon.
My name is Meadhbh and I teach in a Junior School in Jobstown in Dublin. Next year I will be teaching an early start class. So while the children are very young they will enjoy the concepts from this module.
The initial concept I will introduce to the children is the idea of space. looking at pictures of planets, rockets and satellites. Then will will have structured and free play with all our space toys to reinforce the language they will need to continue to learn about space.
I will use the curious minds website. And we will also learn how to use magnifying glasses and our microscope to look at fingerprints we have printed in play dough and with paint.
