The activity im choosing is making rockets. To engage the children I woukd read a book I’ve used before “Astromouse” by Steve Smallman. The mouse in the story tries to get to the moon by building a rocket. After the story we would look closely at how he made his rocket and how he tried to launch it, how he had to get off the ground and work against gravity. This would open up the topic of forces for the class. We would then do some simple testing by dropping objects. The class would engage in fair testing by testing objects of the same size and weight. After observing the results, we would then consider using different heights and weighted objects.
As the book features a mouse, it links perfectly to the Mouse Rockets building task. The children would work in groups, first cutting out and decorating their mouse rocket toppers. We would then fire the cone toppers from the top of the plastic bottles by squeezing the air out. The children woukd then explore different sized bottles, different levels of pressure. We could discuss which ones worked best.
A follow up art activity would be for the children to make their own rockets just like Pip from the story – using every day household objects – toilet roll, sellotape, cones, paper and cardboard. These could be put on display during space week.