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I would focus on Rockets with my class and introduce it by reading the book “There’s an Alien in my Book” by Tom Fletcher. It tells the story of a little alien who’s rocket crashed on to Earth and he has to think of a way to get back up into space. While talking about space, we could talk about astronauts and rockets taking off with their countdown of 5,4,3,2,1 bast off!!
We would then design our own plastic bottle rockets on paper before then turning our drawings into real rockets. This would be a great opportunity for Junk Art in the class. We would then predict which rocket would be able to shoot our little alien all the way bak into space. We would then test our our predictions and have a little marker used to mark our each of the distacnes the “alien” travels. We would compare the rocket that shot the furthest and see if we could make any improvements to the rocket that shot the sortest distance.I love the idea of getting the children involved in retelling what happened in the experiment as it gives them ownership of their own learning. As this experiment is inepensive and easy to create, their “homework” that night could be to go home and teach their family about it.
I love this idea Gillian, giving the kids complete ownership of their learning plus the added responsibilty is a great motivator. We had a similar thing in my class where I cut out and laminated massive glasses and stuck them to our window. Our leader of the day also had the honour of being our Weather girl an Lae. We too had a rhyme, “Weather girl on lae, says the weather for the day”. Once they had decided on the weather, they would tell the class and we would repeat the sentences “chopping out” all the words.
Hands on experiences are so important in the younger classes to make abstract ideas feel more real to the children. When we explore the theme of Homes we often begin by talking about the different type of homes we all live in. We talk about the rooms in the house and we draw and a “room-trait” of our favourite room in the house. After a week focussing on our homes, we look at some animals from different climates (camel, arctic fox, brown bear, penguin) and we talk about what makes their homes or habitats different from each other. We would loook at pctures of their homes and compare and contract them to our homes too. I would begin the questioning of “do you think a penguin gets cold whe they are at their home?” as well as “do you think a penguin would survive if they lived with camels?”. With the aim fo the students thinking before I explain why each may only survive in their habitat.
This could be followed by the children writing a non-fiction informative peice where they choose one of the animals we have look at, draw and label an image of them and write about their homes and how they are able to live their.
This activity allows questioning and prediction as well as looking at recording the information they find out.
I love how hands-on this whole lesson could be Claire especially for the littel ones who need to build up fine motor skills. There is a great book by Tom Fletcher called “There’s an Alien in my book” which my class have loved the last few years. We then extend the lesson by creating our own home for an alien.
When looking at Space as a thematic topic in the oast, I have done a lesson based on stars. I always start with the beautiful picturebook “How to Catch a Star” which the kids love. This often leads to the disussion of what we already know about stars, when we can see them and what they look like. Again this would link beautifully with constellations as some students migth already know things and want to share them with the class. There is a really nice Sesame Street song all about the sun, moon and stars and I would show this video to the class.
This could also work really well if you were studying an artist of the month and could look at “Starry Night” before allowing the children to create their own starry nught scenes.
I absolutely love how you have thought out this lesson. It could be a great topic to do as stations or nearly have a “space day” where everyone will have gotten a chance to do each of your mini lessons by the end of the day.
Every year I love teaching the children about the sun and how we have shadows. This is a partiularly good lesson to do when we get into the summer months as we can use outside as our classroom. We explore the idea of shadows by creating them ourselces with our hands and torches. This links nicely with our “flashlight Friday” where the children grab a flashlight, find a space with a book and read.
I would also use videos to help prompt conversations with the class. As old as they are Sesame Streets videos are brilliant and short for the class. There is a great little song that explores shadows
We could also go outside and using chalk, draw our freinds’ shadows. If we come back in a few hours, the sun will have moved therefore we wouldhave to draw the next shaow. The kids love this activity!!
I love the idea of exploring with marble runs. I have seen some really interesting lessons on TikTok where the children are encouraged to use different materials for their marble run lego, hard plastic, paper vs card) and the results ar egreta plus lots of happy kids exploring independently!
My enquiry based learning would also look at the questions of “why things fall”. This can be linked nicely with how the children fall in the yard, if something is hanging onto the edge of a table and is knocked it can fall. The children will have lots of personal experiences with falling!!
I would then show them different objects (bouncy ball, plastic cup, water balloon for example) and being the “I wonder” part of the lesson. I would imagine a lot of them would know what would happen if these objects fall but the main thing is they would all have different outcomes. I would have the class working in pairs and each would be given a predictions sheet. Some students can write their preditions, others might represent their predictions with drawings.
We would then take our objects and prediction sheets outside and allow the children to do the experiement with each object.
Once fully completed, we would head bck into the classroom, reflect on if any of the predictions were correct, if any were different and display results on a results sheet.
At this age, kids really enjoy being Scientits and exploring everything hands on so it would be very important that although they would be learning the facts about gravity, they gt to try out the experiments too.
Hi everyone, my name is Rachel and I am originally from Offaly but moved to Dublin 4 years ago.
I had been teaching Junior Infants for the last 4 years and will be moving up to First class this year which I am very much looking forward to. The kids love the topic of Science each year and Youtube have some great Science lessons done by astronauts in spcae that we love each year. My fun fact is that a day on Venus is the same as a year on Earth meanign the sun only rises once on Venus.
