The books mentioned in the presentation are lovely and I have regularly used Aliens love underpants. I also have used a fantastic book by astronaut Chris Hadfield called ‘The Darkest Dark’ which we use alongside learning about Space and the international space station in my school. The children love that they can watch him in action in space on the Canadian Space Agency Youtube page and then hear about what he was like as a child watching the first moon landing in the book. Another fantastic book is ‘Whatever Next’ by Jill Murphy to encourage children’s imaginations when learning about space travel.
The rocket mice experiment would be a fantastic experiment to use in junior infants after teaching children about rockets, watching videos of rockets launches and reading both ‘The Darkest Dark’ and ‘Whatever next’. It would be a lovely opportunity for children to experiment and hypothesis how speed and pressure exerted on the bottle will change how high their rocket mouse will travel.