Spring Equinox Activities with Primary School Pupils


Emily Vaughan
Blog Task

Spring Equinox Activities with Primary School Pupils

For this activity we were learning about the spring equinox. Schools were visiting our University to take part in many different activities outdoors or indoors using many resources and creative ideas to celebrate the Spring Equinox. For this task for the school sessions to take part in, all Primary Education Studies students were split into groups to make their task for the children. The children from the three primary schools visiting with the classes ranging from year four to year six.

Our task as a group was to research what the Spring Equinox is and design an engaging activity for the children from the primary schools. We could use type of resources for our activity such instruments especially if we were to use the outdoor learning centre as they are kept there. The activities we had to plan would be approximately 30 to 50 minutes long so the children had time to get settled and understand the activities but also to join in. My group that came together was  a group of six but then we split ourselves into two groups of three as there were many pupils that visited the day we were presenting our activities to the children. Each group had about 10 to 15 children to be able to do the task. 

My group had about 10 children and our activity was to show the children how to use garage band which is showing the children how to make their own music as we wanted to make the theme about spring so we planned to use the music linking towards this so for example using happy, bright music. We thought that the children would engage to this activity a high amount as a lot of children I discovered when showing them are interested in music and this was  an exciting activity for them to take part in. By making this activity work we had to use the resources of many computers so we used a computer room for the hour when having the first group of children to make this task work.  When setting the computers up for the children to use we noticed garage band was not shown on the computer so we had to come up with another idea which then we used scratch which at first was hard to demonstrate as our group we did not know anything about but with us communicating with one another and figuring it out quickly on the spot while the children were waiting patiently to listen to our directions we were able to set this up for them and direct them in the right way. This activity was changed into drawing a picture on a spring equinox theme and what they knew and learnt about the topic as Lecture Dylan and Lecturer Nick had presented a 30 minute presentation to the primary school children about what it was and if they knew any information about it already, this was before we were sent away to begin our activities. This concluded us that we were able to work together and on the spot when something went misleading to plan and the children were engaging with the task and able to pick up on the spring equinox idea but also were able to communicate with each member of our group for support if needs be.

Spring equinox is described to happen twice a year, on the equinoxes the sun shines directly on the equator and the length of day and night is nearly equal but not quite. There is an equinox in March time as it marks the moment the sun crosses the celestial equator, the imaginary line in the sky above the earth’s equator from south to north and vice versa in September. 
The word equinox comes from a Latin and means ‘equality of night and day.’ The equinox occurs at two specific moments in time when the sun is exactly above the equator which is contrary to popular belief, the equinox doesn’t last 24 hours. In the northern hemisphere, the spring equinox or vernal equinox happens around the spring time that is where the spring comes from as March represents the beginning of autumn and spring comes along in September. 

References:

Dictionary.com(2018) Available at: http://www.dictionary.com(Accessed: 11th April 2018).
Spring Equinox- Vernal Equinox(2017) Available at:https://www.timeanddate.com (Accessed: 11th April 2018).




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