The Solar System

Rationale

A few year ago I had taught a unit on the Solar System to a grade 3 class. I spent a good portion of time collecting material to teach this unit.  I enjoyed finding all the resources and making worksheets and games for the students because it was the first time I was doing it.  Over the years of teaching I have realized that if I stay organized with my resources I don’t have to look for resources every time I teach a unit.  This inspired me to pick the Solar System for this assignment. I know I will be teaching it again because it is part of our prescribed learning outcomes.  All the resources that I have chosen are linked to the grade 3 Earth and Space Science outcomes. The resources that I picked are the ones that are easily accessible, 11 of them can be accessed online.

Below are the three science outcomes that correspond to this assignment:

Earth and Space Science: Stars and Planets

•                  describe characteristics and movements of objects in our solar system

•                  compare familiar constellations in seasonal skies

•                  demonstrate awareness of the special significance of celestial objects for Aboriginal peoples

Cited:

http://www.sd79.bc.ca/pilearning/resources/Learning%20Outcomes--Grade%203.pdf

The metadata schema I used was from the one studied in class. It is from the Library of Congress (LOC) website.  I also used the LOC website to cross check my MARC records. As for the summaries and pictures of books I used the Surrey Public Library and the Vancouver Public Library. Also, for the other images on this website I used google images. As part of my metadata schema information I used chapters.ca to find out prices of some of the books.  I used the subject keyword  using a standard subject heading list from Academic Search Online (Ebsco).

To create my website I choose weebly.com. A classmate told me about this site while we were having out class skype session. (Which was very useful by the way, thank you Cathy!).  Since my topic was the solar system I wanted to pick a design that was in the theme of the solar system. I looked at every design there was in weebly.com and tried about 6 of them before I settled on the clouds theme.  This was the closest design to the solar system and I liked the lay out.  I prefer to have a light background and dark letters.  A dark background and light letters is hard for me to read and so I didn't want to have that contrast for my webpage. 


I arranged my resources by the type of resource they were.  I found this to be the easiest and most natural way to organize the 20 resources. Under the headings I didn't have any order to the resources.  



Picture