Outdoors: Stem – discover the Sky at Night

quick wins

Stimulate children’s interest in rocket launches with some real launches– search online for more detailed instructions and remember to aim away from bystanders.

• Water rockets: half fill a 2l drink bottle with water. Instead of the bottle top, place a cork with a football pump needle pushed through it into the neck of the bottle; attach the hose of an air pump to the needle and pump like crazy. Warning: you’ll get wet.
• Stomp rocket launchers can often be found second hand, and are worth investing in. They are really easy to use, even for younger children.
• Design your own space scene or playable resources:
• Create asteroids – paste sheets of brown paper with PVA glue and blobs of black paint, then scrunch them up; roll them in sand while still tacky, then leave to dry. If you make dozens of them, you could have your own ‘meteor shower’.
• Silver-coloured paper party plates make a good starting point for an alien spaceship.
• Use spray-painted drinks bottles or cardboard tubes to replicate an astronaut’s oxygen backpack.
  
  

continuous provision – space lab

Over the year, curate a set of continuous provision resources to enrich role play, loose parts play and your library – but you can also dip in and out of these resources to enhance provision too. Look out for play resources in charity shops, yard sales, the tip and local selling sites; lots of the suggestions below will do ‘double duty’ for other STEM and STEAM projects over the year too.

• Build a collection of space role-play resources: astronaut helmet, a silver or white all-in-one jumpsuit, gloves, goggles and wellies transformed into white or silver space boots with spray paint. Space blankets (emergency shelter foil blankets) can be sourced very cheaply online and are excellent for all kinds of space role play.
• Collect junk-modelling resources, especially flexible tubes, piping, foil fabrics, holograph film, foil cake boards, wrapping paper.
• Collect small-world resources to include astronauts, space buggies and rockets, the space shuttle, telescopes, planets (you can often find these as bouncy balls).
• You could set up a dark tent or sensory room with fluorescent stars, planets and rockets, and use glow-in-the-dark paint or nail polish to highlight other features. Small UV torches are huge fun to use in the dark.
• Create a space library – second-hand story and non-fiction books for children are easily and cheaply found.
• Stockpile old circuit boards and electronic parts for children to build mission control.
• Ask a local carpet retailer for their really thick inner tubes – great for telescopes.
  
  

in the moment – stargazing

Don’t ever be afraid to simply say, ‘I don’t know, let’s look it up’ when children ask tricky questions. Build on your shared existing knowledge of the Earth, the Moon, the Sun and stars and extend their learning if it feels appropriate. Some useful starting points to explore together in books or online are: Why do we get heat / light from the Sun? Why can we only see one part of the Moon? Why can we sometimes see the Sun and the Moon at the same time?

On a clear, dark evening, take children outdoors to spot the Moon, planets and stars. It will be worth you learning the positions of the main night sky features, which are often visible at dusk. The brightest planet is Venus and it can often be seen around sunset. Jupiter is also very bright, but trickier to see from a built-up area.

• There’s a simple trick to tell the difference between stars and planets: stars, just like the song suggests, twinkle; planets don’t – because stars are much further away than planets.
• Ask children what they think Earth looks like from the Moon or from the ISS.
• Look for groups, or ‘constellations’, of bright stars. Lying on the ground, get children to draw imaginary lines between them. Can they ‘draw’ an animal from a story you are reading?

Enhancement – Keep an eye out for a telescope and binoculars. Even if it doesn’t work, a telescope is a marvellous role-play resource, and you should regularly check out web and social media sites, as (working) telescopes and binoculars are often offered free to a good home.

Talk about the Sun; it’s a star, but seems so much bigger than other stars because it’s much closer to us. Explain to children why they can’t look at the Sun with their binoculars or telescope.

There are some wonderful videos from the ISS:

• This one is 12 minutes long, but shows one of the ISS’s solar panels flying over cities at night and much more: https://youtu.be/n4IhCSMkADc?feature=shared.
• In this super clip, an astronaut aboard the ISS answers questions posed by five-year-old children: https://youtu.be/VE76Qc6HoUc?feature=shared.
  
  

book corner

• Noelia Gonzalez and Sara Boccaccini Meadows’ Glow.
• The Space Baby series of board books – e.g., Zoom to the Moon!.
• Usbourne’s Look Inside Space by Rob Lloyd Jones.
  
  

planning ahead

These free apps have excellent functionality and will allow you to plan for astronomical events such as eclipses and meteor showers:

The ISS is the second brightest object in the sky (after the Moon) and moves quickly and smoothly across the sky – it can’t be mistaken for any other object so is a good one for patient children to spot as it takes a couple of minutes to go overhead. The ISS Spotter app includes clear maps of its path, timings at your location, the position in the sky to look for, and more.

• Pocket Universe is a fabulous app with so much to offer. It shows the location of everything you can see in the sky with augmented reality, so when you lift the tablet up to the sky, it ‘labels’ the objects you can see, including planets, stars and constellations. SkyView Lite does a similar job.
• If children are interested in Elon Musk’s space race, the StarLink launches and paths can be easily followed on the Satellite Tracker by the Star Walk app, which also shows all the other satellites speeding across the sky.

Although the apps have given us amateur stargazers a new perspective on the sky, I still think a traditional planisphere is a vital resource. Phillips makes one, with dials that rotate to show a ‘map’ of the sky on any specific night.