[Niall Smith]

Hi Valerie, this is a lovely hands-on lesson. If you give the children the brightness on Mars (e.g., the sun is only half as bright as on Earth) how would that affect the growth of their plants? The key here is to get them realising that the brightness on Earth is not the same everywhere else and that has implications, which they can explore, for growing food on other planets. If a planet is permanently below freezing or permanently above boiling, what do they think would happen to the plants?

[Niall Smith]

Hi Caitriona, exploring and discovering is so important. And understanding why something behaves the way it does can only follow from careful and repeated observations and experiments.

[Niall Smith]

Hi Emer. Welcome to the forum. If you like learning about different planets you can always look at planets beyond our own solar system which have been discovered in recent years. These are distant worlds (trillions estimated), but none anywhere as wonderful for life as Earth is from what we’ve discovered so far. You can ask the kids to imagine their own new worlds. What sort of atmosphere might they have, what temperature would they be, would there be oceans of water, would there be life, what would life look like?  https://www.esa.int/Science_Exploration/Space_Science/Exoplanets

[Niall Smith]

Hi Niamh. You were privileged to be in the presence of Neil Armstrong! What a great memory. The first person to step on a world which isn’t the earth – that’s truly unique. The fun space fact underlines that gravity exists even in space (unlike sounds) and that the moon’s gravity and the earth’s gravity still affect spacecraft when they’re in the vacuum of space.

[Niall Smith]

Hi Fiona, I was wondering when someone would use that line about screaming in space! If screaming doesn’t alert others to you, what does? What options can your classes come up with, and which would be most effective and why?

[Niall Smith]

Hi Shirley, welcome and thankyou for that fun fact. And you’re right that the temperature on the earth is just right for life. The temperature supports liquid water (which is absolutely crucial to all living things). One interesting additional fact is that life helps to regulate the temperature on the planet and without it the earth would look very different, and much more hostile. So we literally live in symbiosis with our planet and it has taken billions of years to get to this stage (with the earth being 4.5 billion years old).

[Niall Smith]

Hi Elaine, delighted that you use the term “active investigators”. That’s so important. It also takes some of the pressure off teachers when they use space in the classroom, because you can investigate together with the kids.

[Niall Smith]

Hi Naomi, welcome to the forum, which is indeed a place of ideas and inspiration. Because it fascinates children – and hopefully adults as well! – space provides a great context for any discussion. “If you were on Mars, would it be the same ….”, for example, opens up a whole new world of questions, quite literally, and encourages kids to imagine and explore and learn and suggest ideas and see how they might test them.

[Niall Smith]

Hi Miriam, I think the open-ended “what else is there for us to discover” is great and could be supplemented with “and how do you think we’d go about trying to discover new things”? You could use prompts like “with your eyes”, “with telescopes”, “with satellites” or “from space” to get them thinking about the different approaches that could be utilised.

[Niall Smith]

Hi Marcella, a really nice experiment. Once the children feel confident in dealing with temperature you could ask them to maybe arrange objects in the solar system (especially the Sun and planets) in order of their temperature. This helps to reinforce multiple concepts, including the idea that temperature is not the same everywhere.

[Niall Smith]

Welcome Edwina. It’s astonishing to think of footprints lasting for so long. You can ask how long footprints might last on different places on Earth. What about on Mercury (which is very similar to the Moon in many ways) or Mars or Venus. This would allow the kids to first discuss and understand what might erase footprints (wind, rain, frost, ice, even tectonic plate activity) and therefore what they should look for on other planets to see if those planets would destroy footprints quickly or over very long periods.

[Niall Smith]

Welcome Miriam! I also think it’s important to teach our kids about the universe in which they live. It’s a fascinating place which is also responsible for us all being alive.

[Niall Smith]

Hi Jacob, welcome to the forum. Great fun fact! It’s usually harder to make big things move quickly, so the fact that the biggest planet in the solar system also spins the quickest seems counter to what we experience usually. This opens a discussion about why observing something can always be usefully accompanied by asking “does that look right, or seem right?”  Often the greatest discoveries happen by someone observing something which seems small and unimportant, but which turns out to be anything but! It’s a useful lesson that careful observation is key to inquiry-based learning.

[Niall Smith]

Thanks for the reflective piece Emma. I like the idea of the teacher being a facilitator, very much in line with inquiry-based approaches and removes the need for the teacher to know “all the answers”.

[Niall Smith]

Hi Emma, welcome to the forum and thanks for your fun space fact. Venus is completely covered in clouds, so how do we know its day is so long? How do the pupils think we can find this out?

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