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A fun fact about magnetic dust. If you hang a magnet up outside your school for a couple of weeks and afterwards see what’s stuck to it, a good percentage comes from iron in the air from shooting stars.
Hi Denise, great to have you on the forum. The silence of space is a popular fun fact. What do classes think about this? Does it make it easier or harder to communicate and can they think of other ways to communicate if space is silent!
Hi Noreen, thanks for the fun fact. This is a great example of how fast things spin. Even though Venus is almost the same size as the Earth, it spins so much slower on its axis. You could ask your pupils to put a list of the length of day on each planet in order from shortest to longest!
Hi Lucy! Well done to your five year old for the fun space fact. That’s a new one on the forum. Can the children compare the size of the Great Red Spot to hurricanes on Earth, maybe using pictures of both? Can they compare the time that the GRS has lasted (hint: since at least the time of Galileo) compared to the longest lasting hurricanes on Earth.
Hi Michelle, welcome. Even though the sun is over 100 million km away, it takes light only 8 minutes, so light must be super fast. Comparisons with the speeds of objects made by humans is insightful and opens up questions about how long it might take to visit other planets – but not the sun!
Hi Jade and Katie. What might a school garden look like on the Moon or Mars I wonder and what would be needed for the plants and insects to thrive?
Hi Jade, that’s great that you’ve now got more confidence and knowledge to do a full space unit. I’m sure you’ll become even more confident after completing the course. That’s a great fun fact. What do the children think it would be like to live on Mars, soon after the first landings and then maybe 10 years later? What type of habitats do they think are needed and what might they imagine? This inquiry would have been somewhat theoretical in the past, but becomes ever more a possible reality.
Welcome Louise. I have no doubt you’ll learn lots and enjoy the engagements with other teachers and their great ideas which are often based on experiences in class.
Hi Aislinn, that’s a very interesting fun fact. It’s a good example that a simple observation does not always lead to the correct interpretation. Meteors do look so much like shooting stars! Doing different experiments to understand what’s happening is often needed if the inquiry is to result in valid results. How might the children determine that meteors are not actually shooting stars? (Prompt/hint might involve whether you’re looking at shooting stars from the ground or from space.)
Welcome Alison. Thanks for the fun space fact which never fails to be impressive when you think about it and when you consider that – as some of the other teachers have pointed out – it would take 1.5 million earths just to fill one star, or sun!
Hi Elaine, welcome! That’s a great reason and I’m sure you’ll find lots of ideas and hints and tips on how to use the ESERO Framework of Inquiry.
Hi Caitriona, that’s a really important fun fact. Venus is an example of just how hot a planet can get with too much greenhouse gases in its atmosphere. We worry, rightly, about 1.5 – 3 degrees of warming, but as you say Venus has reached 467 degrees C.
In terms of the importance of senses, the surface of the moon has more craters on the far side and less on the near side. Perhaps an opportunity to make surfaces of different roughnesses and enquire which the class think better represents the near side and the far side of the moon. Also, asteroids come in weird shapes and sizes and can be made from papier mache, or alternatively represented by stones and rocks. And a dark coloured material gets hotter than a light coloured material, and this can be sensed and introduce questions about melting snow and the earth getting less reflective as a result. Lots to think about!
Welcome Katie. That’s a fun fact that is likely to surprise the kids! It’s possibly a tricky one to discuss, but worth noting that the blue sunset on Mars happens for the same reason that the daytime sky on earth is blue. Conversely, it’s also the same reason why sunsets on earth can be red and the daytime Martian sky is red! https://www.nasa.gov/image-article/sunset-on-mars/