This week is Science Week and light is the suggested theme for Science Week 2016.
There are lots of nice activities suitable for infants to explore in Science Week.
I have used colour mixing as a Science activity. You will need jars of water with some drops of food colouring added, droppers, paint trays and filter paper.
Using the droppers children can add water to one of the wells in the paint tray, they can explore mixing colours by adding different colours. As another activity, you can add some colours the children have created to the filter paper and create butterflies. I have used this activity in class during a Scien-tastic workshop and also by myself during Science Week.
To continue with the theme of light in other curricular areas, you could sort by color in Maths, paint rainbows in Art and identify colours in Gaeilge.
Another great activity for infants is Dancing Raisins. This is an idea suggested within the Primary Science activities. Simply add raisins to graduated cylinders/large jars of sparkling water and watch what happens.
I have also used ramps to explore friction in Aistear. Giving the children different toy cars and a ramp they can explore which car travels further. They can also increase the height of the ramp using text books. The children loved exploring further during this experiment.
It is important to document your experiments especially if your school is applying for Science Excellence Award. I encouraged my class to draw a labelled diagram, they used approximated spelling but it is a process that can be developed in later classes. Here are some examples.
Aistear Múinteoir 