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Consider how many Songs / Poems /Art can you think of to connect us with the Night Sky?
Suitable for Junior/Senior Infants
Songs:
Twinkle, twinkle little star.
Zoom, zoom, we’re going to the moon.
Catch a falling star. (This was one of my favourite songs as a child).
Five little stars.
One little, two little, three little planets.
Five little men in a flying saucer. (This was my own Junior Infants class’ favourite song this year.
The Planets go spinning round and round.
Star light, Star bright.
The Henry Girls – Wonderful, Magical Sky/Aurora – There is a really lovely video on You Tube to accompany this song with images of the Aurora Borealis in the night sky in Donegal and also the night sky in Cork. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KNWBcVicjOI
Own songs: The children could create their own little songs about the night sky using the tunes to songs they are already familiar with, like Twinkle, twinkle little star. They could also do this for poems and rhymes too.
Poems:
Jump in the rocket.
Twinkle, twinkle little star.
It’s a blast.
Hey Diddle diddle.
The Stars.
Star light, star bright.
Rocket by Jack Prelutsky.
Own Poems and Rhymes: As with the songs, the children could make up their own little poems and rhymes too. I have done this with my Junior Infant class as a whole class group and they really love it.
Art:
Starry Starry Night – Vincent Van Gogh. This is a really lovely way to integrate art with learning about the night sky. The children could use paint to try and replicate it or black card and coloured chalk.
Night Sky Diorama – The children could do this little project as a paired activity with a senior class. They could paint the inside of a shoe box to replicate the night sky and then make stars and the moon from clay, paint them and then stick them into/hang them in the diorama.
Create a night sky print using fruit/vegetables to print the moon and the stars. Paint a dark sky background and then use cut out fruit and/or vegetables to create a night sky painting.
Create a replica of the moon and different planets and stars of different sizes using clay and clay tools and paint a dark background in a cardboard box cut in half. Place the moon, planets and stars into the box to resemble a night sky. This is also a project that could be a lovely one for paired work between Infants and a Senior class.
This is a brilliant list Elizabeth. A great resource to hold on to for lessons on the night sky and the stars and planets over the course of the school year.
Children really enjoy when songs, poems and pieces of music and art are part of their lessons in any subject and they are a really good way of hooking them into a lesson. They can also be used to consolidate what you are trying to teach and something that they will remember a lot quicker than they would by just listening to the facts alone.
I really like your idea here about the home/school link Caroline and encouraging the children to go on a dusk walk with their parents and look at the well-lit versus dark areas and the animals and insects they see in both. We are really lucky to have a lovely biodiversity walk right beside our school and we spend a lot of time on it over the course of the school year, but never at dusk because of the time so your idea is definitely something that I will be suggesting to the children in my class next term. I think it will give them a really different experience to the one they are used to on the trail and the opportunity to compare and contrast what they see and find at the different times too.
How you would engage your learners to explore biodiversity in your local area and the possible impacts of light pollution on local biodiversity.
We are extremely lucky where I live and teach to have a Biodiversity walk literally across the road from our school and we make lots of use of it every term.
I am also involved in the local Tidy Towns and look after the school link with them through our Junior Tidy Towns committee which is made up of children from second to sixth class. We were extremely fortunate to be able to explore our local area with two biodiversity scientists who are currently writing a biodiversity plan for our community. They showed us an area right beside our school grounds that they felt would be perfect for a long-flowering meadow and gave us advice on how we might manage this, in conjunction with our local Tidy Towns committee. The children were really intrigued with all of the ideas that the two of them had, and in particular with all of the plants they identified for us, the uses they told us they have and how many different types of insects and animals would be found there and in the trees and hedges beside it if we manage the area properly as a long-flower meadow. We were able to go back to our school and share this information with the children in other classes and other teachers took their class groups down to see it as a result.
When we are settled back in school I am definitely going to take the Junior Tidy Towns children out there again to see how the meadow is looking now that it has been left to grow wild for the past few months and compare it the photographs we took before the summer. Following on from what I have learned so far on this course, I will also discuss with them the impact that the flood lighting from the adjacent football pitch might have in terms of light pollution for the plants and animals who have made this meadow their home and how we might approach the local GAA club with a view to diminishing this impact, especially over the darker winter months.
This is also something that I can see myself exploring with my own Junior Infant class. They love our biodiversity walk and the freedom that they have on it to look at trees, plants, flowers, insects and some small animals. Last year we even managed to spot a red squirrel on the path ahead of us and there was great excitement!
Detail how light pollution is impacting your local area and how you would engage your learners to explore this.
I would make use of photographs and videos of the night sky in our local area to engage my Junior Infants in exploring what is meant by light pollution and what ideas could we come up with to help prevent it.
Our school is situated on the outskirts of a small village which has just one main street and a number of housing estates surrounding it. There is a decent amount of artifical light at night-time, enough to be able to teach the children about light pollution and what it means for animals trying to work out the difference between night and day.
It is also situated beside our local GAA pitch which has a serious set up in terms of flood lighting – a great example of artificial lighting – and right on our doorstep. It is also somewhere that almost all of the children spend time at during the week so they will have the opportunity to see the lights for themselves and think about the impact they are having on the environment around them.
I would start the lesson by showing the children photographs of the sky over our village at night time, pointing out where the main buildings, like our school, are so that they can relate to what they are seeing.
I will then show them some photographs of the night sky in areas where some of them live – much more countryside areas where night lights would be minimal. They can then compare the photographs and discuss why some are brighter/darker than others.
We could brainstorm what they think having lots of bright lights at night means for us and also for animals. What do they think would be better for the animals and why. How could we make things darker around our village/school/homes for them. What rules could we come up with for more careful use of lighting outside e.g. making sure outside lights have sensors so they only come on when they are needed, suggesting that the GAA have timed lighting so flood lights are not left on for long periods in the evenings when the pitch might not always be in use.
We could integrate this with a meeting with our Junior Tidy Towns school committee with our suggestions, inviting them into our classroom to hear our ideas, which they could in turn bring to the Tidy Towns Committee and the local GAA club.
I really like these ideas in your post Mairéad, especially the idea of the children counting the stars that they can see from their own garden at nighttime and comparing answers with others in their class. This lends itself to lots of discussions about light pollution, why it is a bigger problem in some places than others, the reasons this is the case and what the children might be able to do, even around their own homes, to help to fix it.
I think even Infants in school could take part in the star gazing activity with older siblings or their parents and, after some explicit teaching about what light pollution is, give their own ideas as to what could be done to help prevent it.
Observing the Moon.
I would use a 3-D model of the moon that we have in our school as a stimulus for a whole class brainstorming session about the moon, inviting them to tell me everything they know about it and writing all of their answers on the interactive whiteboard.
In my experience as a Junior Infants teacher, this can often lead to a lot of new learning for many of the children in the class and it is also a really good way of seeing what their baseline knowledge is.
We would talk about their answers and see if they have learned anything new from what other children have said. We would then make a list of what they would like to know about the moon and talk about how we might find this information out. This would then lead us nicely into talking about how we might observe the moon and when. I definitely think that a good few of them would not expect to be able to see the moon in the morning so this will be a surprise and something very exciting for them too.
We will go out onto the school yard and I will write their observations on a whiteboard and give them the opportunity to draw a picture of what they see/what the moon looks like. I will then ask them if they think that the moon looks the same or different at nighttime and how might they compare it at both times.
This leads nicely to a home-school link where the children will be asked, as part of their homework, to go out and look at the moon with a parent and do the same thing as in school i.e. talk about what they can see and draw a little picture.
We can compare what they saw both in the morning and at night as a follow up lesson in school the next day and put both of their little pictures together to create a display all about the moon.
This is a really lovely lesson idea and as a teacher of Junior Infants also, I definitely think it is something they would really enjoy. I like the idea of using the story as an introduction and also a way to give them a little bit of background information about space and the planets.
I also like the idea of the home school link – a great way of sharing what is being learned in school with parents and also helping to further children’s interest in the planets by giving them the opportunity to look for them in the sky at night and talk to their parents about them.
I think the creation of a sundial in the school grounds and the observation of the sun at different times of the day lend themselves really well to a block of STEM lessons, with one leading on from the other. I can see my younger class being really interested and engaged in both, firstly in noticing where the sun is at different times of the day and secondly in noticing the differences in where shadows created by the sun are at different times too.
I would start the first lesson with a game of “What’s the time Mr. Wolf?” as a hook for introducing a lesson on telling the time. I would then chat to the children about how Mr. Wolf might tell the time if he didn’t have a watch or a clock to check it. We could talk about night and day as part of this too – when it’s dark it is nighttime and when it’s bright it is daytime so Mr. Wolf would know both of those times easily. How might he know other times then? What could he use? The sun. How might he use it – leading them gently to talking about where the sun is at different times of night and day.
We would take a walk around the school grounds looking for somewhere where we can see the sun, without anything blocking the way, trees, buildings etc. We have a really big, open space that gets lots of sunlight all day and where there are no school buildings and this would be ideal for a temporary sundial.
We often enlist the help of the children in our Sixth class to help us with lessons and ideas and it’s amazing how they are able to work together with the younger children and encourage them to come up with their own ideas then too. I think this would work really well here, and they could help the younger children mark out the shadows each hour of the school day while learning themselves too. We could repeat this lesson once every term and see if the children notice anything different about the shadows each time. Why do they think this happens, leading on to talking about the seasons as well.
Follow on lessons could see the children working together in groups to design and make their own sundials, maybe even having a little competition to see which design might become a permanent sundial on our school grounds.
I really like all of the ideas in this post and they are definitely food for thought in terms of teaching infants all about shadows, about the sun, night and day and about how people used the sun to tell the time many years ago. I know that the children in my infant class would especially love creating different shadows using their bodies and also seeing if they could “catch” each others shadows as they run around the school yard.
I also like the idea of using the cone and the piece of chalk to mark out the shadows over the course of the day and then keeping things simple in relation to “telling the time” by talking about what happened to the shadows over the course of the day and, as you said, not going into too many technical terms.