World Space Week 2023

World Space Week 2023

From the 16th October – 20th October our school celebrated World Space Week 2023. World Space Week is an international celebration of science and technology and its contribution to the betterment of the human race. This year’s theme ‘Space and Entrepreneurship’ recognised the growing significance of the commercial space industry in space, and the increasing opportunities for space entrepreneurship and new benefits of space developed by space entrepreneurs.

During the week, each year group took part using resources from The School's Observatory part of Liverpool John Moores University to enhance and develope their enthusiasm and curiosity for the world beyond our atmosphere. Member from the school's observatory team delivered workshops to our Year 1 children (focusing on constellations) and our Year 5 children (focusing on the scale of our solar system). 

Throughout the week, the children also enjoyed further space themed activities such as: 

Watch-a-long Wednesday - during transitions beween lessons children were able to watch a variety of videos from the International Space Station (ISS) of astronauts doing everyday activities like: brushing their teeth, washing their hair and having pizza parties in zero graviy conditions. 

Space themed writing - the children used a space themed image from Pobble to carry out a range of English tasks from editing sentences to writing their own short stories. 

In P.E. this week, each year group took part in the European Space Agency's (ESA) Mission X - Train Like an Astronaut programme. This saw our children complete a number of tasks, which focused on balance, relfexes, hand eye co-ordination and fitness, to see if they had what it took to become our astronauts of the future. 

To finish off our week, on Friday each year group watched a special selected video from the 'Story Time From Space' project, which allows the children the opportunity to watch videos of astronauts read aloud stories from the ISS. 

Home learning project

Similar to previous years, we ran an art and design based on World Space Week. We have done this as a school before over the years and always been blown away by the excellent responses from our children and families.

We ran two separate competitions and children were welcome to enter both.

The first competition was to create a 2D or 3D (or both) piece of work celebrating space and the future of space exploration as entrepreneurs start to invest more money into exploring space. Examples of this were: rockets of the future, new crafts for exploring distant planets, drawings or models of us living on other planets, buildings and vehicles that we could use on Mars or the Moon or futuristic space suits.

The second competition is to create a solar system in a shoe box, as the key to space entrepreneurship is exploring the planets that are closest to us. A fantastic way of getting children to think about our solar system is to create a solar system in a shoe box.

We had a fantastic selection of entries from across all key stages. Each entry received a prize and our school council selected our overall winners, their work will go  display in other schools around Kirkby. 

World Space Week was an incredibly fun and informative week for our children, teaching staff and families. It has helped develop of children's passion and excitement towards the field of science in an engaging and practical way. We're already excited and looking forward to next year.