MAKING SENSE OF PLANET EARTH AND BEYOND: LEVEL 2

ACHIEVEMENT OBJECTIVES

Students can

and 4. investigate easily observable physical features and patterns and consider how the features are affected by people, e.g., local landscapes, rocks, soils, tides, weather;
understand that Earth is very old and that animals and plants in past times were very different;
use their ideas to investigate major objects in our solar system and very noticeable environmental patterns associated with these objects, e.g., Moon, Sun, planets, day and night, shadow movements, seasons.

Students could be learning by:

observing and describing a beach scene, particularly changing water levels;
recording daily weather conditions for a month using instruments such as thermometers, rain gauges, and wind direction indicators, and comparing this record with an equivalent record produced three months earlier;
comparing their own daily weather records with the weather reports in newspapers, and on radio and television;
looking at animal tracks on hillsides;
making soil sample bottles of soils from different locations;
taking responsibility for the trees and shrubs in a small section of the school grounds;
viewing and sharing ideas about a significant rock formation in their area;
making a wall display that shows life-style differences among dinosaurs;
making a model of a prehistoric animal to show that animals were different in past ages;
making a clay or plaster fossil to model fossil formation;
guided reading of a School Journal article to extend their ideas about a planet or the stars;
constructing a simple sundial and using it to tell the time;
monitoring changes in shadows over a period of time to show change in the position of the Sun;
sharing a big book about the planets to help develop research skills and teamwork.

Teachers and students could assess the students:

ability to identify and locate important local landforms, when the students use a sketch map of the area;
ability to infer how local landforms may change, when students draw a sea cliff as it may appear many years in the future;
acceptance of a shared responsibility for their own school environment, when the students plant and maintain a small garden outside their classroom;
knowledge of Earths environment in the past, when the students describe where and how a large plant-eating dinosaur might have lived;
understanding of the cause of shadows, when the students share their ideas about how shadows change shape during the day;
ideas relating to the Suns apparent motion, when the students predict where their shadows will fall in one hours time.