Forum Replies Created
-
Posts
-
Hi Suzanne, welcome and thanks for that amazing space fact. The mountain you refer to is in the centre of a huge crater on Vesta. The mountain was formed when the crater was formed. If you look at some of the videos of water or milk droplets you’ll see a bounce-back in the centre and that’s very similar to what has happened here, but on a much larger scale. It would be amazing to be in the crater on Vesta and look at the central peak which is almost three times higher than Everest. The imagination of kids would be perfect here!
Hi Helen, great to hear you’re already benefitting from the enthusiasm that space evokes in the classroom. Thanks for the fun fact and highlighting the inspirational videos from astronuts such as Chris Hadfield.
Hi Helen, great to see that you like Christine’s fun fact, which is truly amazing. You can get other ones on this forum and build up a list which you can use in your classroon.
Hi Christine, welcome to the forum and delighted to hear you use space as a theme each year. Hopefully you’ll get some new ideas as you work through the modules here.
Hi Fiona, a lovely lesson which fits very well into the inquiry-based approach. Do your pupils know of any other types of liquid which appear as rain on other worlds. As pointed out on this forum, it rains sulphuric acid on Venus and even diamonds on Neptune! So different materials might be needed on different planets. It highlights that the earth is one example of what a planet might look like.
Thanks Susan for that fun fact, another popular one on the forum which lends itself naturally to inquiry-based learning and exploration in class. And the shadows idea is also excellent. Do the kids think there are shadows on the Moon and Mars? Why would they expect shadows there?
Hi Eimear, thanks for that creative lesson. This is particularly relevant now, as we see efforts growing to return to the Moon. When astronauts went there in 1969-1972 they only stayed a number of hours or days (Apollo 11 stayed 22 hours while Apollo 17 stayed 75 hours). So they brought all their own food. But this is not sustainable going forward, so we’re going to have to grow food on the Moon somehow – and this lesson is perfectly timed to get suggestions from the kids!
Hi Emer, that lesson covers a lot of interesting ground. And from my experiences doing it, it turns up some surprising results. So observation is really important and sometimes the predictions are not matched by the observations, which opens up great conversations as to why.
Hi Elaine, welcome and thanks for the fun fact. Footprints will indeed last a very long time. It’s amazing to think that the craters you can see with your unaided eye (or a small telescope or binoculars) have been there for millions to billions of years, and were there when dinosaurs roamed the Earth some 65 million years ago.
Hi Susan, I totally agree. Inquiry-based learning doesn’t have to be complicated. That’s a big takeaway from the discussions on the forum. The approach is actually creative, fun and exciting as it fundamentally encourages our children (and ourselves) to explore ideas against a backdrop of good practise ways to do so.
Hi Emer, thanks for that fun fact. It’s interesting that the biggest volcano in the solar system is on a planet that is about half as big as the Earth. Also known as “Olympous Mons”, the mythical home of the Greek gods, you can get some great photos on line from ESA and NASA spacecraft. A volcano on another planet allows you to ask your class whether they think it’s active (and what “active” means) or dormant, or dead. What causes volcanoes and what are some examples on Earth?
Hi Susan, welcome and thanks for the space fact. I think Venus is winning the race to be the favoured space fact!
Welcome Andrea and thanks for the fun fact. The word “planet” means “wanderer” and is indeed an ancient Greek word. Our ancestors didn’t have telescopes, so they had no real way to know what the planets are, but they could observe these points of light as moving relative to the background stars (which are fixed, relative to one another) and the full extent of their understanding was limited – but they could see that these points of light “wandered”.
Hi Mary, welcome to the forum. A million is a difficult number to get our heads around, at any age! But the sheer scale of the number underlines why the Sun has such an influence on our weather, even though it’s very far away. You could ask the kids what they think would happen if the sun was much smaller (would earth be cooler?) or bigger (would earth be hotter) or closer by or farther away?