Last week was Space Week and Hawkstone class had lots of fun continuing our Stargazers topic.

In English we researched Tim Peake, the first British Astronaut to fly to the International Space Station, and planned a Biography about him which we are writing up in class this week. We found out lots of interesting facts – try asking your children what they can remember about him.

One of the most asked questions about space in our class was “Is there other life out there?” So we looked at the Mars projects and carried out an investigation on some fictional planet soil samples to test if there was any carbon dioxide present in the soil which might suggest that there had been life on our imaginary planets. One of our soil samples did show evidence of CO2 which could suggest life. However, we discovered that so far Scientists have not found any hard evidence to suggest that there is life on the other planets in our actual solar system.

We also linked our Year 4 Science topic of digestion to space by finding out how digestion is affected in space.

Year 5’s used spaghetti and marshmallows to create star constellations. We found out that years ago sailors used the stars to guide them – like a map in the night sky. We looked at the star signs and which star constellation to look out for in the month of your birthday.

We all created some amazing artwork based on the real life artist and astronaut Alan Bean after reading the book – The Astronaut Who Painted The Moon; the true story of Alan Bean. Alan Bean completed two flights into space and even landed on the moon. On his return to earth he painted images from his journey and even added some moon dust to his work. Most of Alan Bean’s paintings included images of astronauts so we used foreshortening (where images in the background look smaller and fade away) to draw and paint images of ourselves as astronauts using watercolour paints.

We began to create Papier Mache planets which we will paint this week and add to our Stargazers display.

Thank you to all of the parents who have supported their children in creating a satellite project. We have had some wonderful entries from models to paintings and even satellite cakes!