MAKING SENSE OF PLANET EARTH AND BEYOND: LEVEL 1

ACHIEVEMENT OBJECTIVES

Students can

and 4. share their ideas about some easily observable features and patterns that occur in their physical environment and how some of these features may be protected, e.g., hills, beaches, rivers, cliffs, weather, seasons, tides;
suggest ways that their immediate physical environment was different in the past, e.g., the school playing fields, land use, river channels, road cuttings;
share their ideas about objects in space and about very noticeable environmental patterns associated with these objects, e.g., Moon, Sun, stars, day and night, seasons;

Students could be learning by:

observing temperature change throughout the day, or from day to day, and recording their findings;
making a group collage to illustrate seasonal behaviour of living things;
talking about seasonal changes in relation to birthdays, holidays, and seasonal events;
choosing suitable summer and winter wardrobes;
talking about and recording the activities that people do in different seasons;
drawing pictures of trees on hillsides and talking about how tree cover may change with time;
listening to someone who has lived in the area for many years talk about how the local environment has changed as they have grown up;
comparing dated photographs of their home or school area to comment on changes in their environment;
expressing their own ideas about the Moon or Sun and listening to those of others;
talking about seeing the Moon in the daytime;
drawing pictures to show the activities that they do at different times over a twenty-four hour period;
talking about the stars they see in the night sky.

ASSESSMENT EXAMPLES

Teachers and students could assess the students':

ability to communicate their ideas about environmental changes, when the students role play the elements that make up winter and summer weather;
awareness of patterns in daily activity, and ability to work as a member of a group, when the students construct a group time line showing that people often do the same things at much the same time on different days;
appreciation of ways landscapes change, when students describe how their neighbourhood used to look compared with how it looks now
awareness of differences between day and night, when the students draw pictures and write simple sentences about this;
ability to accurately recall main ideas, when the students retell the story of a Māori legend about the Sun;
ability to recognise different shapes of the Moon, when they talk about diagrams of these.