Teacher: Peter Biggs
School: St Laurence’s Catholic Primary School
Every year, St Laurence’s Catholic Primary School celebrates World Space Week.
World Space Week, which runs from October 4th to October 10th, is an international celebration of science and technology and its contribution to the betterment of the human race.
During the week, we plan a range of space-themed activities for children to complete and participate in both in school and at home. Although the topic of Earth and Space is only specifically taught within upper key stage 2, we use the week as an opportunity to get all of our children to take part in space-themed lessons.
As champions of The School’s Observatory, we have used The School’s Observatory’s lesson resources for the last few years to deliver discreet lessons in all year groups focusing on space. The reasoning behind this is to enhance and develop our pupils’ enthusiasm and curiosity for the world beyond our skies.
In previous years, members of The School's Observatory team have kindly visited our school and delivered workshops in Key Stage 1 and Key Stage 2, delivering their excellent constellations lesson in Year 1 and looking at the scale of our solar system in Year 5.
Across the school, each year group completed the following lessons from The School's Observatory:
- Nursery and Reception – Make a Tasty Constellation
- Year 1 – Stars and Stories
- Year 2 – Let's Explore The Solar System
- Year 3 – Design your own planet
- Year 4 – Create a Pocket Solar System
- Year 5 – Make Your Own Impact Crater
- Year 6 – What's Your Age on Another Planet?
After completing their lessons, the children’s work is shared across the school with a large display showcasing their learning and with our families and the wider community through various platforms so that, as a school, we are celebrating our learning with each other.
The children absolutely love the interactive nature of lessons and have asked, ‘Can we do space week every week of the year?’.
There was also a positive feedback from the staff on the easy-to-use and follow nature of the lessons, the level they are pitched at and the use of readily or easily available resources within each lesson so there is no additional time or workload pressure on them to spend hours preparing and making resources.
As we have done this for several years, staff and pupils alike look forward to Space Week and The School’s Observatory lessons they’ll be completing.
To further support the children's engagement with the theme of space, we also run several themed days throughout the week:
- Watch-Along Wednesday: during transitions between lessons, children were able to watch a variety of videos from the International Space Station (ISS) of astronauts doing everyday activities like brushing their teeth, washing their hair and having pizza parties in zero gravity conditions.
- Themed Writing Thursday: the children used a space-themed image to carry out various English tasks, from editing sentences to writing their own short stories.
- Story Time From Space: to finish off our week, on Friday, each year, the group watched a specially selected video from the 'Story Time From Space' project, allowing the children to watch videos of astronauts reading aloud stories from the ISS.
As a subject leader, the impact of using The School’s Observatory lessons has been that children are engaged and excited and want to learn about space. As a result of using the The School’s Observatory’s resources, our pupils are now talking and sharing what they have done with their friends and families and further deepening their learning and curiosity in an exciting field of science.
For staff, they feel more confident within their own subject knowledge of delivering a lesson on space, they are able to use a range of techniques to deliver a lesson on space that they can apply to other areas of the science curriculum, and they now have an area they can go to for further ideas of CPD.
To conclude, The School’s Observatory lessons have helped to develop our children's passion and excitement towards the skies above us in an engaging and practical way.