A space mystery is challenging young explorers at St Nicholas at Wade Church of England Primary School.
The Year 1 and 2 children have been set an exciting scenario in their school grounds that meets an intriguing inter-galactic briefing.
It reads: “Crash! What’s that in the playground? Let’s go outside and take a look. Stand back everyone – it looks like a UFO has crash landed. Find out who might have landed by exploring the craft and investigating scattered scientific specimens. Create a ‘Welcome to Earth’ box for an alien explorer. What can you put in it to help explain what life is like on our planet?”
The intrigued pupils were confronted by a crash site with some of the debris from the stricken spacecraft littered around.
In a hurry to get away, it looked like the alien got his trousers caught on a tree. The pupils then enjoyed trying to work out what the different parts of the spaceship might be and wondered if the light was sending a message back to space, so they could eventually help their visitor from space find its way back across the stars to its home.
To further their cosmos theme, they are considering what it would be like to be an astronaut. They will create a sturdy air-propelled rocket and see how far they can make it travel. They will also research the names of the planets in our solar system.
Head Teacher Taralee Kennedy said: “This themed learning has really fired their imaginations. It is a thrilling scenario for our pupils and they are now considering a whole range of possibilities through learning and research.
“In Design Technology they will be making a spacecraft, and exploring how to make it stiffer, stronger and more stable. In Science they will investigate a range of objects, the materials used to make them and their properties.
“In Computing the team will learn about the different purposes of technology and how we can create algorithms to control them.
“This topic crosses into so many different strands of learning and the positive feedback from our pupils so far is fantastic – you could say they believe this topic is out of this world.”
