The Museum of Science Star Lab came to our school last week.
It created quite a stir. The Library was closed all morning and the gray dome of the Star Lab was visible from the door, causing everyone but the first graders to ask, "What's that?" Kindergartners through 8th graders gazed curiously at it, wondering, "What's in there?"
The first graders got to find out.
We've been talking and reading books about stars for days. We moon-gazed and thought about why the moon looks different each night. We talked about the planets in our solar system. We tried to wrap our heads around how big Jupiter is (it can hold 1400 earths -- that's ONE THOUSAND FOUR HUNDRED). First graders have no idea how big that is really, but they know it's BIG, really big. We talked about how you can't walk on Jupiter because it's a gas giant, and Mercury is a small, rocky ball. Venus is hot, too hot to live on. Mars has red dust. We replayed the debate about poor Pluto and decided, for our purposes, that we'd think about it as a planet unless some new information came to our attention.
We spent time talking about constellations and demonstrated how some stars are nearer to Earth than others, while some are very far away. Light years and the dimensions of stars are pretty far outside the understanding of this age group. Come to think of it, a light year is pretty much outside the understanding of most adults! We talked about twinkling stars, red giants,and blue and white dwarfs. I think first graders find comfort when they talk about stars using images of giants and dwarfs. They are still enthralled by fairy tales with over-sized heroes and heroines who confront evil-doers and dispatch them to their well-deserved fate. The cosmos is a magical place for them as well.
We are re-working our science learning expectations in our town. I've been meeting for almost three years, working with colleagues to revamp our first grade curriculum, and in the process we have determined that we will eliminate the sun, moon and stars unit and replace it with a sun and shadows component. We hope to make our science more hands-on, exploratory and inquiry-based.
I understand and agree that we should be doing this: understanding the huge -- more accurately characterized --unknowable-- processes at work in the universe is beyond the understanding of six and seven-year olds. I know that as a result of our work our first grade science learning will be age appropriate and ultimately far better science; still, like most teachers, I find it difficult to give up experiences that I thought my students liked. It's going to be hard to say goodbye to demonstrations of moon phases and making planet models. I hope that our new lessons will generate excitement, the "wow!" and that thrill of not-quite-knowing-but-what-am-I-going-to-see my students experienced in the Starlab.
We will continue to read books about the moon, though. And maybe a poem or two about the constellations.
So I need to share one of my favorite children's poetry books here , Comets, Stars the Moon and Mars by illustrator/poet Douglas Florian. We can pay a visit to our solar system in poetry!
Sunday, April 25, 2010
If you're out there in the blogosphere and have managed to stumble across the 1DDiaries, you already know I teach 1st Grade... and I'm still here!
I'm leap-frogging over the past eight months of school -- and five months before that -- perhaps we'll catch up later -- it's almost May and the first graders are humming along. They're reading, they're writing, they're whipping through math, they're just...amazing!
This is the time of year that I love. In the course of the year we worked first on setting up daily, then weekly routines which allowed for the One-ders to discover and make sense of our English language: finding and recognizing letter patterns, unscrambling letters to make two, then three, then four-letter words, re-organizing words until they made sense in a sentence, hours of reading and talking about one text in groups of five or six, finding rhymes in weekly poems, conversations and reinforcement of the previous days, now these come together.
On a "Big Picture" Language theme - The One-ders can approach a bookshelf, open a book, read the cover and make a decision as to whether they want to read that particular book -- or not. They return to their desk or chair or place on the rug -- and read independently. Sigh....
Of course we didn't get to this place without some pain.
I'm leap-frogging over the past eight months of school -- and five months before that -- perhaps we'll catch up later -- it's almost May and the first graders are humming along. They're reading, they're writing, they're whipping through math, they're just...amazing!
This is the time of year that I love. In the course of the year we worked first on setting up daily, then weekly routines which allowed for the One-ders to discover and make sense of our English language: finding and recognizing letter patterns, unscrambling letters to make two, then three, then four-letter words, re-organizing words until they made sense in a sentence, hours of reading and talking about one text in groups of five or six, finding rhymes in weekly poems, conversations and reinforcement of the previous days, now these come together.
On a "Big Picture" Language theme - The One-ders can approach a bookshelf, open a book, read the cover and make a decision as to whether they want to read that particular book -- or not. They return to their desk or chair or place on the rug -- and read independently. Sigh....
Of course we didn't get to this place without some pain.
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