Room 8 2015: May 2015

Room 8's provocation is underway. At the beginning of the term the children created pastel art works that were based on what they wanted to learn about. They also wrote a short caption to explain what was happening in the art work.

As you can see there is a strong theme of space, so after a group discussion we decided to go down that road. Our big idea is from astronomical systems in the Science curriculum: Students will, share ideas and observations about the Sun and the Moon and their physical effects on the heat and light available to Earth.

One of the tasks for the week was to look at some pictures of the Earth, the Sun and the Moon and record some wonderings. This directed the children to what they wanted to find out.

The children have started off by writing descriptions about the Sun. They lay out in the Sun and shouted out adjectives to describe how it felt. Some of these were; relaxing (Blayke), warm (Rylie), burning (Carlos).

The children talked about how it is dangerous to look straight at the Sun so observing the Sun will need to be done in a special way. They know they can watch some video clips online but they wanted to find out another way. After researching 'safe ways to observe the Sun' the children discovered that they could make a pin hole camera. They were able to project an image of the Sun through a pin hole on to a piece of card. This helped the children create some adjectives to describe what the Sun looks like.