I am a pre-service teacher gearing up to teach a lesson about Earth's rotation creating day and night. Who can share about this? Thank you!
Hey Katelyn, I just observed a lesson that my mentor teacher did about day and night and I thought a few activities she did was really great. The teacher started out asking the students what they knew about day and night (asking then what do they see and how to they behave differently?) and wrote down what the students said. Also one thing she did was gave the students a worksheet and have them circle the activities related to daytime in one color and the activities related to night in another. A modification of that is have the students create a list in groups or individually or daytime and night time activities. The list doesn’t have to be in writing I would also encourage students to draw different daytime or nighttime activities, the drawing aspect may catch their interest more than writing will. Another activity that the teacher did was take a flashlight and an inflatable globe. She had a star placed on the globe that marked where we were and then shined the flash light on that spot. She then explained that this represents daytime and then she turned the globe to show that as less light is hitting the spot it is getting darker and when the light is not shining on the spot that is representative of when it is night. This also allows students to see that when it is night where we are it is daytime in other places. I hope some of these ideas help and hope the lesson goes great! Autumn
Hi Katelyn, I looked up some lessons and resources that you could use for your lesson. The first one includes a two day break down of the night and day process and also includes some activites that you can add on to the end of the lesson. http://www.eyeonthesky.org/lessonplans/05sun_daynight.html This second link has a lot of other activities that you can use in your classroom. On this link is also a list of book that relate to the topic and that might help to give the students a little background on the topic. http://www.uen.org/Lessonplan/preview.cgi?LPid=28498 Hope this helps a little! Good Luck!
Hello Katelyn, There are a lot of great resources online to help with this subject. I wrote up a lesson plan on this subject and I got some great ideas off of Pinterest. Autumn brought up some really great ideas for preparing a lesson on day and night. I used a couple of these as well. Another thing that I saw was a little more hands-on for each of the students. If you go to this website, http://www.moretime2teach.com/2013/02/earths-orbit-misconception.html , you will see a great worksheet that the students can use to better understand the concept of why we have day and night. Although the scale of the Sun, Earth and Moon are not accurate, they can get a better idea about how they affect day and night. I hope this helps.
Hi Katelyn, I'm also a pre-service teacher. Videos may help students understand the concept, especially visual learners! This one is especially helpful and engaging: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l64YwNl1wr0 (Earth's Rotation & Revolution: Crash Course Kids 8.1). I'm not sure what grade level you will be teaching, so this video may be a little more than the students need to know depending on the grade level and your objective. Hope this helps though!
I really like Autumn's suggestion of having students identify activities that they do during the day and the night. I think that this engages students to begin to think deeper about the concept of day and night.
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