This year I am in year 5 again – the great thing for me staying in the same year group is reflecting on what worked well and what we need to change/adapt for the new cohort of children.

This year we have made use of the fantastic resource from the BBC Stargazing site, this includes a set of fantastic lessons plans as well as videos which help to explain more complex concepts.  Alongside these are a range of lesson plans and information sheets – a great resource for all those who are looking at the topic of Earth and Beyond.

In ICT we have been making use of Purple Mash which has a range of resources based on aliens and space – a large proportion of these are free and provide good prompts for the children for writing.  We have also downloaded SPEX Lunar onto our system – this is a great free resource.  The children used it to design their own moon base, thinking what astronauts would need for a base on the moon and designing it accordingly.  Another great resource is Google sky which enables you to look at constellations and explore the sky at night.

In Literacy we have once again looked at stories in space - this is the blog post I wrote last year about using Storybird and the picture book the Way back home.  We have also made use of the fantastic Literacy Shed - this is a great resource featuring a range of videos, we made use of the Sci Fi shed and started our topic with the lovely imaginations video.

We have also had a visit from a mobile planetarium and visited the Science Museum.

More great ideas for Space can be found here – a great blog post by Bill Lord