TEACHING ASTRONOMY FROM PRACTICAL ACTIVITIES

Abstract

Astronomy teaching in the final years of elementary school has some peculiarities. One of them concerns the fact of having a teacher trained in a Biological Sciences course. Most of the time, the curriculum for such a course does not include a specific Astronomy teaching discipline. This absence directly affects the way such knowledge is approached in the classroom. In order to contribute to the teaching of Astronomy in Basic Education, our work aimed to assess the pedagogical potential of a book of interdisciplinary practical activities in Astronomy for the final years of Elementary School. Our work was divided into two stages, the first has a qualitative approach of the descriptive type for which we used as a tool for constituting the data the field diary produced by the researcher professor during the implementation of the activities, as well as the documents produced by the students. The second stage has a quantitative approach, for this, an experiment was carried out, comparing the performance of elementary school students from an evaluation instrument composed of 29 questions about Physics and Astronomy, before and after the implementation of the activity book. interdisciplinary Astronomy practices. The results of this stage were organized using the paired parametric t test. The choice of this test takes
into account the intra-individual dependence on the observations. In general, our results show a
construction of practical and dynamic thinking that motivated students to have an interest in the
theme Astronomy and the most important: a change in the attitude of the teacher-researcher in
the classroom. We understand, therefore, that the implemented material has a great pedagogical
potential, with a motivating and reflective character.