Learning about the planets

We are learning all about the planets in our solar system.

Here is a song that helps us remember the planets names:

Teacher showed us how to fold little booklets that tell us all about the planets.

We coloured the planets in the correct colours and we sang along to this song:

Here are other short videos we also watched:

The Planets data chart

Now that we know the names of all the planets and a little about each, teacher let us choose our favourite planet.  These are our choices.

We enjoyed talking about which planet was the most/least popular and by how much, we added groups of planets and compared those and we chatted about reasons why we made the choices that we did.

Space PE games

We are learning all about space.

Today's PE games all had a space theme.

We played craters and volcanoes. 

The boys kept turning all craters into volcanoes while the girls kept changing the volcanoes into craters.  At the end of each game we counted to see whether there were more craters or volcanoes.  This decided the winning team.

The cold planets and the sun.  When touched by a cold (blue) planet you had to freeze, but when touched by the sun you warmed up again and could un-freeze!

Astronauts and rockets.  If teacher called "rockets" the girls had to run to the wall before being tagged by their partner, but if teacher called "astronauts" the boys had to run to the opposite wall without being tagged by their partners.

Earth, Rocket, Moon (a variation of Ship, deck and lifeboats).  This game involved running to the correct place, earth, rocket or moon, but also miming moon walks, blast off, eating/drinking/sleeping on the rockets.

We had so much fun with these space games.

Using shapes to make air rockets

Shapes are amazing.

Teacher showed us how we can roll a rectangle to make a cylinder,

how we can fold and chop a rectangle to make a square or diamond and triangles,

how we can roll a circle to make a cone.

Armed with this knowledge we set about making air rockets.

Teacher had made the cylinders for us, because that is a slow job, but we stuck on the triangular fins, and made and stuck on the nose cones.  We also decorated our rockets.  We will fly them outside when the weather improves a little.

Making and flying foam rockets

We made our own foam rockets.

These are so much fun.

We used insulation for pipes for the rocket cylinder and we used squares of card to make the triangular fins.  Teacher helped us with the duct tape so our rockets are really strong.

These rockets fly when we stretch the elastic backwards and then let go.

We had a knock out league in the corridor and Jakub was the class champion.  His rocket flies really well (so does Adam's), and went the furthest each time.

Making straw rockets

We are starting to talk about space.

Today we made our own straw rockets.

This is quite easy to do.

All you need is a half of an A4 sheet of paper, some sticky tape and a straw.  We also used some rocket tops to make our rockets look really cool.

 Can you figure out how we made them?

If not, click on this link for more information.