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I really like the idea of scaffolding the students with the ‘bright’ star that they can easily find. I also think your lesson idea lends really well to students using their knowledge both at school and at home. I wasn’t familiar with Stellarium before this course but it is a really interesting App and I agree that it has plentiful uses in the classroom, particularly for middle and senior groups.
I have chosen to use the Worldwide Telscope resource and would create a simple graph template with 2 axis, once showing time of day and the other showing the level of the sun. This lesson would be suitable for a Senior Class.
Using Worldwide Telescope, I was thinking of a few different lessons you could use for this resource. One would be tracking the Sunrise and Sunset times over the course of a month, using a large class graph display with each child contributing.
Using the ‘Suns Seasonal Journey’ resource on WorldWide Telescope, I also think an integrated Maths and SESE lesson of giving the students different locations and graphing the seasonal Sunrise and Sunset times compared to Ireland would be a great way of showing the seasonality of different locations and having students explain why those locations have different daylight length compared to here at home. I would encourage the students to think about longitude and ask students how this might affect the seasons in each of the different locations.
Hi Ronan, I like the idea of having the students predict what is going to happen with the sun. The structure of your lessons sounds like it would lend well to collaborative group work and some excellent discussions would arise from this. I also really like the idea of the groups creating shadow markers, which could be a really good junk art engineering design project. Thanks for sharing your ideas.
Lesson; Observe and record the positions of the sun when rising and setting, and at different times of day?
Trigger question; Why is there frost on the ground when we come into school in winter?
Age grouping; 3rd Class
Our school is a perfect environment for showing the different behaviour of the sun from season to season. During Winter we frequently have frost cover which gradually dissappears as the sun rises during the day. A simple way for us to document this would be for groups of students to draw lines of where the frost begins with chalk at 30 minute intervals from 9am. We would use an Ipad to create a time lapse over the course of the day showing the sun moving ‘moving’. I would also like to use the information to provoke thinking on whether it is the Earth or the Sun that is moving, a common misconception in both students and adults! We could also complete this idea on December 21st and June 21st to show both extremes of Winter and Summer Soltace and then compare our results.
Regarding the Unravelling STEM article, What struck me was the idea of students making their predictions and analysing their results. My favourite thing about teaching Science is that it gives the space to make mistakes and learn from them, and that it is a process to be enjoyed rather than something you immediately ‘get’. I also enjoyed the critical thinking aspects of Technology, reinforicing that anything useful can be technology and that it is constantly developing.
