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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.
Veronica,
a nice set of materials for this activity are the set from the module, these are used in a few of the ESERO activities.
The floating and sinking from ESERO appears as “Does Saturn Float?” This includes an attractive poster for children to use to record their predictions.
Which characteristics would you expect children to identify as making a difference to floating and sinking? Please note that density is not used in primary science, rather objects can be described as heavy for their size. Would you have materials that can be shaped, such as tin foil? In this case you can find that it both sinks and floats, depending on shape that could lead to an interesting “take the next step.”
Siobhan,
The Glitter Germ can be an excellent prompt for the children to start an investigation inquiry.
After they have seen the demonstration they should try to construct an explanation of what they have seen. Then they will have questions that they can investigate to confirm their understanding.
You might consider offering a range of liquids that could be added to the glitter water – The Children’s Museum of New Hampshire has a nice description of some possibles (toothpaste, cooking oil, hand soap) and outlines the science behind why different liquids behave differently.
Sharon, if you wanted to make explicit the new vocabulary, you might use something like this “New Words” poster from SFI.
Sharon,
You have given a lovely example of discovery learning, of slowly allowing a process to happen and to let the children wonder and explore.
Depending on their understanding (since this is about how acids react with carbonates, which is very much 2nd level — see this article which gives the chemical reactions https://www.scienceofcooking.com/eggs/naked-egg-experiment.html), they may come up with additional questions that they could investigate.
Welcome to the course Muireann,
Parachutes and falling object make up part of the whole school Curious Minds CPD, and are an active way to help children use their science comprehension in a design and make task. In this example, they were designing the investigation to find the best way to determine if a parachute was good or not. They could also use their understanding to predict which material would make the best parachute by considering strength of material, flexibility of material, weight of material. For fair testing they would need to have the same design of parachute.
The class discussion after testing is a perfect example of “Sharing: Interpreting the data / results.”
You’ll find a completed Framework for Inquiry on this topic at
https://www.engineersireland.ie/LinkClick.aspx?fileticket=0g0LZLmOFMQ%3D&portalid=0&resourceView=1
David,
you have the key part of the inquiry process, which is to ensure that the children are applying their understanding to make predictions which can be tested.
There needs to be this understanding “We talked about magnets and magnetism at the beginning of the lesson and predicted whether items would be magnetic or not.” for the children to be able to make predictions.
How much of the video would you show since electromagnets are topics for 5th and 6th class?
Grace,
interesting choice of book:
it seems to be about a lot of different usages of stars (as rewards, as calendar markers, as something to keep in your pocket), but finishes up with a bit of night sky.
Given that SESE Geography expects Infants to identify and discuss the sun, the moon and stars
I’d try to keep the discussion on similarities and differences.
Be careful with statements like: “They are much bigger and hotter than our sun” since some stars are bigger and hotter, but in the immediate region of space near the Sun, it is one of the biggest. Smaller and cooler stars are harder to see, so the stars we see in the night sky are preferentially the nearer and naturally brighter ones. This advanced level activity lists stars by proximity and brightness.
How long would you expect to take with this sequence of activities and would you arrange this as stations?
Thank you for sharing that book suggestion. https://www.adamscloud.com/products/adams-amazing-space-adventure
I think there is the opportunity to discuss the language and descriptions of the Moon, Sun and planets from the book, and compare them to Earth.
‘The Moon is too bumpy, the Sun is too hot, Saturn’s air is so bad’ etc.
Deirdre,
even though SESE Science uses the language of ‘guess’ when talking about predictions [Predicting • guess and suggest what will happen next in structured situations – Skills development for infant classes / Predicting
• suggest outcomes of an investigation, based on observations – 1st/2nd class]it is vital that the children justify what they think with reference to their scientific understanding.
If they understand very little about a topic and need to guess, then build in more time to let the children observe, explore and wonder and then they can try to explain the phenomena. From their explanation will come the investigation topic.
A child who notices that the tissue falls slowly and it floats down and the toy bear falls faster and straight down might form their own ideas about forces and can explore them by perhaps combining the tissue and the bear to make a parachute for the bear. Will it fall at an in-between speed? Will it fall faster than the tissue by itself?