LET THERE BE LIGHT!

This term I decided to throw myself in the deep end and challenge myself to teach Day and Night with NOS (Nature of Science) as the focus. Specifically, I wanted to focus on the use of models to explore scientific ideas and explanations. I also wanted the children to have some understanding of how scientific knowledge changes over time.

We started with a PPK exercise (Prior Personal Knowledge) in which the kids wrote down their ideas about how we get day and night - along with diagrams. I hope to add some of these on here. We then used those ideas to have a debate, which I videoed. This seemed to go really well.
As a class we have then come up with key questions and the children have started to research what they can in books and on selected websites. We have also looked at youtbe animations of the Earth's rotation and have looked at the scale of the distance/size of the earth and sun.

Some questions which have popped up along the way have been: (after a discussion about gravity) - why do the clouds stay up if everything is pulled down? And - 'I have seen the clouds moving....why do they move?'

We are going to be exploring what we find in our research using models of the earth and sun/

During maths we will be possibly making sundials or pendulums or such to explore the concept of time.

During literacy we will be writing explanations so that we can eventually write some simple explanations about day and night.

So much to do! The kids and I are both really enthusiastic about it - which is great!