Moral Tales, penultimate week
May. 15th, 2011 02:12 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
edenfallingPart of today's lesson plan was to go outside and do a "scavenger hunt" based on sunlight and shadows. Since today has been nothing but rain and solid overcast, that was pretty much out of the question.
We let the opening drag on a bit longer than usual -- did Joys & Sorrows and Gems of Goodness instead of just the latter -- and then decamped to the Arch Room, which has no windows and can therefore be dropped into proper darkness. There we used flashlights and apples to demonstrate how the earth's rotation creates night and day, and how the tilt of the earth's axis and the resulting angles at which sunlight strikes the earth create seasons. I made the mistake of saying, at the start of the lesson, that the earth had three motions but we were only going to talk about two, and then, in order to kill time, got dragged into attempting to explain the precession of the equinoxes to a group of eight-year-old kids, though it's been years since I did anything astronomy-related and I was always more into chemistry anyway. *hands* Whatever, it ate a few minutes and I wasn't horribly inaccurate, so we will call it a win.
Then we went back to the classroom where we wrote things that the sun does/provides on strips of yellow paper, which the kids then tacked to the display wall around a yellow circle representing the sun. Finally, to kill more time, I got dragged into retelling a quick and dirty version of Daedalus and Icarus, because I am much better at extemporising stories than Joanna, who was my co-teacher today.
And now I am going to take a quick half-hour nap before heading off to work.
We let the opening drag on a bit longer than usual -- did Joys & Sorrows and Gems of Goodness instead of just the latter -- and then decamped to the Arch Room, which has no windows and can therefore be dropped into proper darkness. There we used flashlights and apples to demonstrate how the earth's rotation creates night and day, and how the tilt of the earth's axis and the resulting angles at which sunlight strikes the earth create seasons. I made the mistake of saying, at the start of the lesson, that the earth had three motions but we were only going to talk about two, and then, in order to kill time, got dragged into attempting to explain the precession of the equinoxes to a group of eight-year-old kids, though it's been years since I did anything astronomy-related and I was always more into chemistry anyway. *hands* Whatever, it ate a few minutes and I wasn't horribly inaccurate, so we will call it a win.
Then we went back to the classroom where we wrote things that the sun does/provides on strips of yellow paper, which the kids then tacked to the display wall around a yellow circle representing the sun. Finally, to kill more time, I got dragged into retelling a quick and dirty version of Daedalus and Icarus, because I am much better at extemporising stories than Joanna, who was my co-teacher today.
And now I am going to take a quick half-hour nap before heading off to work.
