On Tuesday 23rd April, Dr Mandy Hartley from The Little Story Telling Company came to visit year 1 to deliver an exciting workshop about rockets and planets. She started by showing the children a size comparison of all the planets and stars in our galaxy. The children were amazed to learn it would take 1100 years to travel once round the biggest star in the galaxy!
Next, the children split into planet teams to complete a series of tasks. They made a playdough planet to the size of the picture given to them by Dr Hartley, found how many moons each planet had and identified the time it took to orbit the sun. Some teams even had time to learn how many hours were in the day on their planet. Did you know? Jupiter has 67 moons!
We learnt new facts about the planets including the heat of each planet, if they are gas planets and if we can see planets from Earth! Have a look and see if you can spot Jupiter this evening!
We played Top Trumps with the planet facts, which linked beautifully to our English lessons last week where the children created their own Top Trumps about the planets in our solar system.
The children shared some facts they knew about the different planets:
“Mars is red” Stephen
“It is 365 days or 1 year to go round the sun on Earth” Rafe
The children used reasoning skills to work out which planets would be the quickest or slowest to orbit the sun.
“The smallest planet has less weight so will be the quickest to orbit the sun” Auralia.
“Neptune will take the longest as it is the furthest away” Renelle.
We finished the workshop with some rocket experiments outside. We used water and alka-seltzer tablets in a film canister to create a mini rocket launch. Dr Hartley explained that the rockets were using the force of thrust to go through the air.
“I enjoyed when the rockets went flying up in the sky” Harrison.
