The Schools' Observatory News

February 2024

New Primary Teacher CPD!

We are thrilled to announce Our Place in Space, the first of our new suite of CPD courses for educators.

Made with the UK Irish curricula in mind, our CPD (Continuing Professional Development) courses are completely free, thanks to the generous funding provided by Liverpool John Moores University.

Our latest CPD Courses are interactive and flexible, and you can study at your own pace. We will be adding more courses throughout the year.

You can explore the wide range of resources available on this site to utilise in the classroom, as well as topic knowledge and common misconceptions.

Our Place in Space - the first of our new suite of Teacher CPD Courses.

Astrophysics Work Experience Week!

Applications are now open for our annual Work Experience Week for students in year 12 (or equivalent, in the UK and Ireland).

The application form is now open and will close on Monday April 15th 2024.

Visit our Work Experience page for more details and the link to the application form.

Please note that while we welcome students from all across the UK and Ireland, accommodation is not provided. We can provide financial support for public transport costs.

We especially encourage applications from students within the Liverpool City Region.

The week consists of talks and workshops and will give the students an idea of how professional research is done at a university. The students will work in pairs to research an area of astrophysics and produce a poster summarising their work. Each day will start at 9:30 am and end at 4:30 pm.

Some of the talks and workshops include:

Introduction to Astrophysics
Using Astronomical Data
Introduction to Robotic Telescopes
Design a Telescope
Science Communication Skills
University Life
Careers in Physics

There will also be opportunities to talk with current students about what it is like to go to university.

Things To Do

Over the last few months, we've been busy adding more and more resources to the Things To Do catalogue.

This project has included refreshing older classroom activities. If you can't find a lesson plan you used to use, it has migrated to Things To Do. But don't panic! Things To Do has a helpful search function to find resources by topic, age, or curriculum.

Newly created or refreshed content this month:

Have you ever asked the questions: What is an exoplanet? What types of exoplanets are there? What is the closest exoplanet? Can we visit exoplanets? Why search for exoplanets? Watch our video 'Science Questions: How Do We Search For Other Planets?' for answers (for ages 7 - 18)