Junior science

My lovely wife does the odd bit of relieving and, like any good husband, I like to help by giving very helpful suggestions on what she could do! Occasionally, I do get it right and I thought I'd share these lessons that I planned out as I think they would work for any level and are a great way to draw in science, art and literacy! The class my wife works in is a Year 3 bunch so the science was more 'lightly dusted' on the top. I do love the idea of lessons like this (and not because it was my idea!) as the lessons have elements of science: vocabulary, topic ideas, drawing on prior knowledge and challenging one another... it's all about the nature of science!

The mighty "Rexcelsius"! From www.lego.com

I suggested the theme of space travel with the students creating spaceships. First, there was lots of discussion about what you might need in a spaceship, and not just the control bits like where to steer from and the engines but also recreation areas, sleep areas, where to eat, etc. After the discussion, a Lego ship of mine was brought out which had lots of rooms for the children to explore and various hatches and doors to open. From this, the children decided that they also needed somewhere for the "small spaceships" to live so that they could visit other planets. I do like the idea of students brainstorming and then having the opportunity to do a bit of exploring as we did here with spaceships (although to be honest, I'm not sure my Lego spaceship could be considered legitimate... it had a disco room!).

Students then designed rooms in pairs and built it using card in a small vertical box that my wife made with all these put together to make one big spaceship! They wrote about the function of the room and this writing was shared with other pairs and this became reading time. It's another thing that I like to do: students reading and writing together as this is a good way to develop Key Competencies and think about the first strand "Understanding about Science"- how do scientists work together?, how to do they argue?, how do the scientists share with others?

If I had older children, I might draw more connections to current space travel, for example, what's going to power our spaceship and its engines? I'd also challenge students to think about water  and oxygen -I'm pretty sure the ISS has some kind of recycling system so children might like to look this up to see if they could install similar systems on their ship. For the year 7 and 8 students, I might get them to investigate some of the current concerns and research into long term space travel.

Mars. From www.technologyreviewcom, NASA originally.

Their next day's programme involved having found a planet! Although I was keen on letting children choose everything, my wife decided the planet had purple sky and red grass. The students decided on yellow water! Again, with older children, we might investigate a little further -for example, what colour is Mars' sky and ground? Why? Could you have a different colour surface? What have we found in our Solar System that could allow us to choose the colours of the environment thinking scientifically?

My very favourite of all my CGI animals!
Look how happy he is! From www.pinterest.com

They used some of my photos of CGI animals (if you're interested, they're stored in a shared folder for a wee while: bit.ly/R3animals). I love it when we can just let children go for it! They grabbed their iPad minis, typed in the URL and browsed the images themselves. Then the conversation became about the animals: what might they eat?, where would they live? For example the bearigator eats meat and berries, it can run fast so can catch its prey. It doesn't swim well but it it does submerge and can just stick its nostrils out to breathe so great for hiding! The students then created their own hybrids and crayon and dyed a background. Again, older students would get a little more freedom and not have to make a simple hybrid... but they would need to justify their creature. Sometimes I've seen students create a creature that eats humans and is 50m high with bright red and yellow feathers. We talk about how much food would this huge creature need? Would the colours be of benefit? If it was this large and needed a lot of food, what size territory would it need? I have always let children just go crazy at the beginning. "Mine's a huge tentacled creature that drops down from trees. It catches humans and sucks their blood and then screams loud," has happened far too often... so we'll talk about the weight of the creature and it's tentacles, talk about animals we see on Earth with tentacles, etc. Often students will go back for another go, thinking more scientifically. These kinds of conversations are really science-based with vocabulary, investigations, critiquing, communicating, predicting, validating, etc. They're also starting to understand how science works. I don't mind the older students being imaginative but it has to fit with what we know scientifically -and yes, if they can explain it then I'm happy: the gravity is lighter on this planet so the bugs can get larger...

Anyway, I really just wanted to share with you the lesson pair and encourage you all to have a go! Both days were full of writing, reading, art and science with creativity and logic being encouraged. I did want to share some photos too but my lovely wife forgot!