We watched a video clip of a real astronaut called Tim Peeke. When he was in his space shuttle, he squirted some water from his water bottle and it turned into a floating ball because there is no gravity in space. We thought it would be very funny if there was no gravity in Kindergarten as we would be all floating around the classroom! We have enjoyed reading fiction and non-fiction space related books that the children brought in from home. One interesting fact we found out was that stars do not actually twinkle, their light wobbles as it passes through Earth’s atmosphere!
We have been very creative making alien spacecrafts, using paint, plates, pompoms, cups and googly eyes. As a group we made ‘space jelly’. First, we weighed out jelly crystals and Mrs Tomkins poured in boiling water and carefully mixed it together until the crystals dissolved. Then came the exciting part, we sprayed ‘moon dust’ on top of our jelly. As the sun shone through our windows, the moon dust particles floated around and began to sparkle – it was magical and we thought this is what it would be like in space with the stars, an awe and wonder moment! We then needed to work out how we could make this jelly liquid turn solid and agreed it needed to go somewhere cold – one of the children suggested “the freezer”. We decided that the fridge would be the next best thing and were so excited to find our plan worked – the liquid had turned into more of a wobbly jelly solid.
In maths, we revisited the 2D shapes and began to look and name some 3D shapes, noticing that Earth is a sphere shape.
Next week, we are going to find out more about the eight planets in our Solar System.