[Melissa Courtney]

Hi Deidre,

Thanks for sharing your activity, it’s great to show the moon landing footage and say “yes, we’ve really been there!”. After your crater experiments, you could ask them how many craters they think are on the Moon altogether, (the  answer is millions). You can explore a real 3D reconstruction of the Moon’s surface on this NASA-data-based site, taken by the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter Camera (LROC): https://quickmap.im-ldi.com/

[Melissa Courtney]

Hi Cáit,

Thanks for sharing your lesson with us, what a fabulous way to connect the stars to other places by exploring the different stories the same constellation holds across different cultures. Stellarium is a fantastic tool to use too, it lets the children see exactly what’s overhead on any given night, so it could be a lovely way to check whether the constellations you’ve discussed are actually visible from Ireland at the moment, and to let them explore the sky for themselves beyond the lesson.

[Melissa Courtney]

Hi Gráinne,
Thanks for sharing your activity, these are great questions to spark the children’s imagination. One thing you could try is giving them a fact about another planet and asking them to imagine what an alien from there might look like. For example, Neptune is made mostly of gas, so what kind of creature could survive on a planet with no solid ground to stand on?

[Melissa Courtney]

Hi Francis,

thank you for sharing your activity and mindmap, I appreciate you pointing out how special Earth is in our own Goldilocks zone.

The differentiated constellations for the Seeing Stars activity is lovely way to keep the whole class working on the same concept across ability levels. The corridor display sounds fabulous, definitely the kind of thing the kids will be proud to show off to their friends.

[Melissa Courtney]

Hello Sharon,
This sounds like a wonderful long term teaching plan. There’s a lot to learn about the planets, and I think breaking it up into an introduction to the planets, basic facts, size, and then having students become “class experts” on one planet in a group is a wonderful way to help them internalise the facts at a slow, manageable pace. I really like that you follow up by having them use what they’ve learnt to think about what a rocket might need. With older children, we have an exercise for determining a landing site on Mars, where the surface conditions and other factors are used to select a spot.

 

[Melissa Courtney]

Hi Alisone,

Wonderful lesson, thanks for sharing with everyone. There is some great potential with exploring different material types and how they block light or let it through too. You could also use different colour translucent materials (Coloured sweet wrappers) to show how it changes the light cast by a torch too.

[Melissa Courtney]

Hello Denise,

Sounds like a fab activity, i particularly like the integration of drama with the shadow puppets. One thing you could add is to use chalk to trace around each others shadows, so they can see how their shadows change over the course of the day.

[Melissa Courtney]

Hi Sinead,

Great way to explore the solar system with the children. There are some wonderfully crisp images taken of the planets by the Hubble telescope that you can find here https://science.nasa.gov/missions/hubble/hubbles-grand-tour-of-the-outer-solar-system/

[Melissa Courtney]

Hi Aoife,

Thanks for sharing this lesson, particularly around the shape of the earth. As the earth has a huge mass, its strong gravity pulls everything tightly to its center making it spherical. This isn’t the case with smaller objects in space with smaller mass. Good examples of this are Deimos and Phobos, the moons of mars: https://science.nasa.gov/mars/facts/

They are much more irregular, closer to a potato in shape

[Melissa Courtney]

Hi Brendan,

Great lesson plan encouraging prediction, testing and observation. I particularly like that you talk about scientists sometimes being proven wrong by their experiments. A good scientist changes their mind when the evidence tells them to, which is a valuable life skill too!

[Melissa Courtney]

Hello Jennifer,

Welcome to the forum and thanks for sharing your fact. It turns out that Earth isn’t perfectly round either, it’s what’s called an ‘oblate spheroid’ and slightly squashed with a bulge around the equator, a bit like a lemon too!

[Melissa Courtney]

Hello Una,

Welcome, We hope you enjoy the module and find lots of new and engaging ways to teach space to your students!

 

[Melissa Courtney]

Hello Edel,

Welcome to the course and thank you for sharing your fact and lesson.
In addition to diamonds forming in Neptunes interior, there are high-speed winds in the outer atmosphere (around 2000 km/hr)! A very challenging environment.
I love your model for teaching about the planets, and how to explain the different between a day and a year on venus.

[Melissa Courtney]

Hi Gráinne,

Welcome to the module. We hope you will find plenty of interesting facts and activities to teach your students about space here!

[Melissa Courtney]

Hi brian it looks like the formatting has pasted its code. You can use ctrl+shift+v to paste as plain text and that should get rid of it

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