,

Lunchtime, Mr Heal wolfs down his baguette quickly – he has things to sort out for the afternoon’s visit. His year 6 class are going to play host to half a yr2 class from Shaw school.

The Neston children are briefed and know they are going to be put in groups and expected to teach the smaller children about their work for the afternoon as they go along. There’s a huge air of excitement and some of Mr Heals children have dressed up as scientists for the occasion.

The first thing that happens is everyone sits in the classroom in front of the interactive whiteboard and they are shown a video of the link up with the ISS that happened two years ago.
,

, .

Some of Mr Heal’s Yr6 appear on the video asking questions of the astronauts live from their link to space.

"What do you do in your spare time?"
"We lean out of the window and take pictures of Earth"? (did he really say that?!)

"What happens if you get ill in space?"
"I don’t get sick up here because the only person I can catch germs from isn’t sick either – as long as he’s OK, I’m OK!"

"How do you get water?"
"Well, we recycle water, even the water vapour we breathe out gets recycled."

"How do you feel when you look down on Earth?"
"It makes me want to visit all the strange and interesting places I see from up here."

After the video is over Mr Heal and all the children decamp across the playground to the dome. It accommodates all the children – it’s very cold this afternoon, and there was a smattering of snow during lunchtime.

Mr heal has already decided who from Neston is going to form groups of three then allocates the children from Shaw in pairs to the Neston Groups. He dishes out laminated instructions for the space related mini projects that the children will investigate for the next hour.

,

, .

The general impression is of a certain amount of mayhem, but follow each group and it’s revealed that the children have set out to complete their tasks.

The Life Forms group were looking for ants, at first running around under the trees until Sir gave them a hint about paving slabs, and sure enough a little network of tiny tunnels threw up quite enough ants for the afternoon.

,

, .

The rocket crew where having a whale of a time, supervised of course, you don’t want to get in the way of a rocket!













Here are some pictures of the afternoon’s proceedings.
Click any small picture to see a larger version

 ,

, .

After an hour where the children were doing their thing, Mr Heal gathered them back into the dome and shared what they’d all found out, showing all the gathered children the various technical and natural wonders, including the ant space gel, the light sensitive trucks and the generating bike.
Click any small picture to see a larger version

 ,

, .

Then it was back to the classroom for (what else!) some astronaut style freeze dried strawberries and ice-cream before the Shaw school visit was over.

Afterwards Mr Heal’s class talked about all the ideas they have for the moon base, to see if there’s anything they can add to the growing number of features out there. Everything from swimming pools to rabbit cams.

It had been an exciting day that the children had planned for and they were very happy to have the other half of the Shaw class back soon.

The Laminated Worksheets



,

Go back