Well it's a new year (Happy New Year to all who celebrate it!) and a new class topic, luckily for me all bar one of the classes I work with are studying space this term which is great, it's one of my favourite topics! I have so far discovered that if there are no watermelons in the shops, a cauliflower makes a reasonable Jupiter and also that if Mars is a blueberry, keep it in a separate container so it doesn't get squashed on the way to school!
It was nice to get back to the outdoor learning sites this week after the holidays. I was pleased to find that the beds with leaves spread over them are far less weed ridden than those without - it was a task well worth doing!
I spent the morning in the Scrapstore getting resources to create telescopes and found some clear plastic containers which could become Earth-based space craft windows. My mind started wandering and now I have a plan to create some Zero-G style growing experiments similar to the ones carried out by astronaut Don Pettit on the ISS last year, only with 1G and a lot more children! I'm looking forward to seeing the experiments the children design to house in their spacecraft windows and reading the diaries they are going to write. I'll put a link to their blog once they've got something written. Scrapstores are brilliant places for finding new ideas and you get to recycle things in the process.
As far as the Growers' Nation project is going, there has been lots of work happening behind the scenes both with the user interface and the science behind the app. We're hoping to be trialling some things later in the year but I shall tell you about them another time.
I need to go and learn some Russian so that I am at least one lesson ahead of the children - we're having a break from learning French this term to fit in with the topic. Hopefully one of the children will use it to help secure their place on a future flight into orbit! If not, at least we'll all be a bit better at understanding different languages and cultures. До свидания
