How can Explorify help you teach children about Light
Explorify can help you plan a unit on Light and build long term memories with our new and undated activities.
Our helpful new guide identifies Explorify activities that are particularly useful for formative assessment, science enquiry and retrieval practice. When planning lessons, it is important to find out what children already know about the learning focus, uncover misconceptions and identify strengths in children's prior knowledge to ensure your lessons meet the needs of your class. Explorify activities are an engaging way to do this.
The guide identifies Explorify Light activities that will support your subject knowledge and provide ideas for appropriate science enquiry in the classroom, saving you valuable time planning. Other Explorify activities can help children revisit and consolidate what they have learnt during the unit. This will deepen their understanding, building long term memories.
Odd One Out activities are great for getting children discussing the difference between light sources and reflected light. Shine On will help deepen this understanding focusing on different sources of reflected light. Have you ever been somewhere where you couldn’t see anything when you woke up in the night? will get the children talking about the absence of light and tease out the common misconception that their eyes can “adjust” to the dark after a while. It will also reveal who in your class has experienced total darkness and give them the chance to be the “experts”.
There are two new activities about light reflecting off shiny surfaces Throw back and See you and the What If we didn’t have mirrors is guaranteed to lead to an interesting debate about the positives and negatives, as well as consolidate children’s understanding.
The new Zoom in, Zoom Out Blocked will start the discussion about light travelling through some materials and not others. Can you see me? can be used as retrieval practice - the Zoom In, Zoom Out reveals shadows created by opaque and translucent objects. The Odd One Out Shadow fun shows the shadows of three different children and the What’s Going On Shadow Shapes is a good starting point for a shadows investigation – there are links to Royal Society and Ogden Trust resources in the Take it further.
There are new activities to support the learning objective ‘light appears to travel in a straight line’. The Odd One Out Straight on shows the lines of sunlight visible in some woods, through clouds and under the sea - get the children to focus on the similarities in the three images before they focus on the differences. The Take it further has suggestions for how to model light travelling in straight lines in the classroom. It is a good idea to teach this objective in the Autumn or Winter when it is easier to block the light from outside the classroom. The Who Is Danielle Basquette? looks at how light travels down fibre optic cables to give us Internet connections.
The new Big Question Can you mix coloured lights in the same way as paint? challenges children to investigate how mixing coloured light behaves differently to mixing paint. For example, mixing red and green light gives you yellow, but mixing red and green paint gives you brown.
The Scottish curriculum also includes exploring the structure and function of sensory organs. Have you ever had an eye test? and the Zoom In, Zoom Out See the light will help you find out what the children already know and give ideas for investigations. The new Who is Patricia Bath? focusses on the achievements of an African American eye doctor who invented lasers to remove cataracts. Cataracts are a very common eye condition, particularly as we get older. They cause the lenses in our eyes, which are normally transparent, to become cloudy.
The Sun is the Earth’s main source of light but it can also be dangerous damaging eyes and causing sun burn, which can lead to cancer. The new Zoom in, Zoom Out Got you covered is a sun hat and there is a new What if our eyes were sun glasses? Children can use UV beads to understand the strength of the sun and test the effectiveness of suncreams or sunglasses.
For more advice about building long term memories read our blog here. You can also watch our planning support video on teaching light and download the supporting PDF. There is also a guide to Tackling the tricky bits of light.
Tell your teaching friends and colleagues how Explorify has helped you and encourage them to sign up if they are not already have a log-in.