Grade: 1
Course: Science
Curricular Content: Common objects in the sky
Time of Year: Anytime
I am so excited about this post! Can I just be a real teacher, with a real class already so I can do this?! AND, how cool would it be to be Ms. Frizzle and have a Magic School Bus to literally take my class to outer space. Unfortunately, I don’t see that happening anytime soon, but I can watch Ms. Frizzle’s episode on Netflix titled “The Magic School Bus Gets Lost in Space!”
Clearly, we’re not actually going to outer space, so, we’ll have to get a bit creative with this one. I found these awesome virtual tours of the International Space Station. The tour guide, Suni, is pretty funny as she shows us what it’s like to sleep in space, go to the bathroom in space, and even brush your teeth in space. Because this field trip is designed for little six-year-olds, I think it’s important to have a lot of movement and activity throughout it. All the virtual tours are great, but for the sake of keeping things short, I’ll focus my efforts on this first tour:
To set the stage, I’d decorate the room (maybe with the students help) to look like space by putting up a picture of the galaxy on the smart board, maybe hang a few giant stars, maybe put some black plastic table clothes over the windows. I’d, also, program my disco light to shine white lights all over the room to look like stars in the night sky while outer space type music plays in the background (there’s lots of instrumental space type songs on Spotify). By now you’ve probably figured out that I like to have a little treat on my field trips, so I went searching for some ideas. How cool are these? If you want more information about any of these treats, just click on the image.
Knowing that young children can’t sit still for very long, I would watch part of the virtual tour, then stop and do a coordinating activity. Here are some of my ideas:
- Pause at 0:40 mins.
“What do you find kind of funny in the video so far?” Her hair!
ACTIVITY: Bring out balloons and rub them on students heads to make their hair all staticky (only if the students want to participate.) - Pause at 3:53 mins.
“What do you find interesting now?” Floating water bubbles!
ACTIVITY: Have the kids try to catch edible bubbles with their mouths (kind of expensive on Amazon) or have them catch regular bubbles with their hands (much cheaper). - At end of video:
ACTIVITY: Try some freeze dried food (ie: blueberries, skittles, etc). There’s a chance that one of your students might own a freeze dryer machine, if that’s the case, maybe they’d be willing to share some food that they have freeze dried at home.
Those are just some ideas I have about the first video. I’d, also, like to do some science experiments that have to do with space. I love this one where kids hypothesize about why there are craters on the moon and, then, do an experiment to discover why. And, of course, I’d take some time to show the students what the moon and other planets ACTUALLY look like through the satellite images on Google Maps. If you don’t know what I’m talking about, check out my fancy dancy little video here.
I know this field trip will be a little different since we won’t be leaving the classroom, but I think with a little effort, it can become a super fun, memorable day.
CROSS-CURRICULAR OPPORTUNITIES:
I’ve saved lots of cross-curricular ideas on my Pinterest board here: