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Eoghan,
given the changes that are coming with respect to STEM in the Irish primary curriculum, I think it is important to assess where your school currently is on STEM.
There are changes around SESE vs Science, Technology, and Engineering Education and Social and Environmental Education which have changed the time allocation over a month. As this course has tried to show, Geography Skills and Science Skills work so well together, so that may be a way to continue to offer science within the 3h 20 min to 4 hours a month that is suggested for junior classes.
Felicity,
have you a class set of torches? I have found that the more inexpensive torches are often multiple LED lights and when they act as a source of light, multiple shadows are made.
It might be worth looking at getting some desk lamps if you have plugs that can be used safely with your classroom arrangement.
Eoghan,
how will you measure the speed? I think it is more likely that you will use a fixed height and drop two objects together and see which one hits the ground first, in essence comparing time.
Note that using the actual formula pushes this activity very much to the upper end of primary.
(Maths has Explores the relationship between time, distance and speed, but as a j).
By using different objects, the variable the children will be investigating is likely to be surface area. If they are also varying mass, then comparing objects will be quite difficult.
This Gravity resource from Engineers Week structures the inquiry slightly and might make it easier to ensure that the learners are building up their knowledge.
Siobhan,
thank you for sharing your space week plan, please do register your school as hosting an “event” at spaceweek.ie. The activities you have described would make up the event. If you wanted to showcase at the end of the week and invite parents to visit, then that could be part of the Curious Minds Awards as well.
Hold a science open day or evening where students present their STEM work to the school, parents or wider community.
Michelle,
thank you for sharing the video link, what a lovely, informative video it is to act as a clear prompt for the children.
The questions that you ask and the children can then wonder allows them to share what they understand as they pose their own starter questions.
Blubber glove can be a very clear way to show the effect of insulation.
Some of the concepts will also be covered by older classes, particularly in relation to adaptation for environmental conditions, but this is such a clear theme that is very suitable for younger children.
Niamh,
I like your relevant context for this investigation activity, which could be treated as both science content learning and as applying learning in a design and make.
Keeping Jacko dry is very important, and in the summer months you could revisit this to make a sun parasol to keep him from getting sunburnt.
A quick google search for an image to support your prompt gave me this:
Hello Sharon,
Have you a particular story book in mind? If you review some of the previous posts in the forum you will find a wealth of suggestions.
You could also look at the ESERO activity Day and Night in the World about nocturnal animals or What do you do in Day (part of Module 2’s downloads).
What do you expect the children will do with the cotton wool when they create day and night scenes?
You might want to look ahead to the Sun resource (also part of Module 2) from Dr Maeve Liston from Mary Immaculate that suggests:
Activity: The Day and Night Sky
You will need: Pictures of the day and night sky, paper and crayons.
1. Place different pictures of the day and night sky on display and ask the children “what are the differences?” between the two.
Questions: Describe the sky during the day. Describe the sky at night. What is the difference between day and night?
2. Ask them to list as many things they see in the sky at night (Moon, Stars) and during the day (Sun, Moon, Clouds). Get them to describe shapes, size, textures and colours of these objects and the sky using descriptive and comparative language for example light, dark, bright, shade etc. Discuss how we are never in total darkness because of the Moon and stars.
3. Ask them to draw pictures of a day and night sky or make a collage of a day and night sky as a whole class group.Your questions are interesting, we have found that in response to “Why do you think it gets dark at night?” young children tend to offer people-centric responses such as “So we can go to sleep”, and so we often re-word this to ask “What do you think is happening to the world when it gets dark?”
Robyn,
Offering children a playful opportunity to explore magnets is very much in keeping with the inquiry process as described by the Framework for Inquiry and perfectly fits the SESE Science Curriculum for Infants (• investigate the fact that magnets attract certain materials /• investigate materials for different properties, for example materials that are attracted by magnets )
Through their play they will explore and wonder. If they then form the mental model that metals are magnetic it is valuable to include some metals that are not magnetic in the materials that the children test. Coins are an easy option, as are jewelry items made from silver or gold, and aluminium cans.
The curriculum for 1st and 2nd class looks at specific metals: (• investigate that magnets attract magnetic materials, such as iron and steel). So, depending on the school plan for Science, you may want to plan for play with Infants and a deeper exploration at 1st/2nd class level.
Hi Síle,
are you familiar with the ESA videos that told the story of Rosetta?
ESA made a cartoon characters that voiced the different spacecraft.
https://www.esa.int/ESA_Multimedia/Videos/2016/12/The_amazing_adventures_of_Rosetta_and_Philae
https://youtu.be/HD2zrF3I_II?si=HoJPXXLAiYzjsh4O
The “science” ones are here.
When we opened the science exhibition at Blackrock Castle in 2007, Rosetta was still enroute to Comet 67P, so we included an interactive game that was based on landing on the comet.
Michelle & Ellen,
Ramps have been suggested as one of the key topics to help young children directly experience forces in playful, unstructured learning. The team at Iowa’s Regent’s Centre for Early Developmental Education have done a lot of work on “Ramps and Pathways,” which you can find here: https://regentsctr.uni.edu/ramps-pathways/ramps-pathways
They state “Ramps & Pathways provide contexts for children to feel success, and also a context to understand how mistakes are opportunities to learn.”
and suggest that teachers should pay particular attention to vocabulary and avoid words such as acceleration, mass, velocity, and momentum, using instead :
Positional Words and Phrases
Higher, lower, next to, between, on top of, under or underneath, beside, behind, in front of, below, above
Directional Words
Down, up, forward, backward, sideways, through, over
Descriptive Words for Movement (or lack of)
Fast, slow, stable, steady, solid, wobbly, roll, slide, jiggle, tumble, teeter, jerky, bumpy, bouncy, smooth
Descriptive Words for Properties
Hard, soft, flexible, metal, glass, wood, plastic, heavy, light, hollow, solid, round, cylinder, cube, sphere
General Vocabulary
Incline, ramp, pathway, track, object, speed, systemPol,
this is similar to an ESERO activity called “The Ice is Melting” that looks at the difference between melting sea ice and land ice.
Sea ice floats in water, so when the iceberg melts, it fills in the space that it was already occupying.
Water in a glass will increase in volume when it freezes, but there shouldn’t be an increase in volume when ice in water melts.
You could modify this plan to mark the water level before you add the ice – and then you are showing displacement in action. However, when that ice melts, it will not increase the volume any more.
Sinead,
would you enhance the learning by showing them a video from the ISS? There are a few that start over one part of the world and go to another.
There is also this live feed:
https://www.youtube.com/live/P9C25Un7xaM?si=_YBpr0z7rtd0cz0Q
Note that due to the ISS’s orbit, it is out of signal for some of each orbit, and at that time you get this screen:
David,
the students in your class might be interested in the current Artemis mission, which plans to send humans back to the Moon.
https://youtu.be/8dHwQq0GrAA?si=rVctxv7_UsX7Gsam
Also being built is Gateway, with European involvement.
Marie,
you have it exactly. There needs to be background understanding for inquiry to really help children learn science content. By taking their prior experience with these reactions into account, you can offer them a challenging design and make activity that uses that science in a concrete way.
We used to make lava lamps with visiting children in our birthday parties at Blackrock Castle, using food colouring, oil and water with fizzy vitamin tablets. My colleagues learnt pretty quickly which were the nicest colours to use as the vitamin C tablet changed the colour of the food colouring.
Veronica,
this is another nice example of a prompt to stimulate further inquiry. The children can play with the game material and then quickly explore their own questions about “how far away can the magnet be and still be able to pull the car?”
We do a similar activity in workshops at Blackrock Castle and ask children to make a maze for a bug to move through. The bug is drawn on paper and attached to a paper clip. Magnets are held by hand under plastic art trays, or under the table. The children can engage in maths talk as they describe their mazes and see if they can go faster through one type of maze rather than another.