Description:

It was a relatively short drive for one of our team to get to Innellan Primary School on the Cowal Peninsula, so today’s visit was done as a one off. The school had 31 pupils divided into two classes, P1-3 and P3-P7, so we chose to run sessions for both sets. We started the day with our Earth, Sun and Moon workshop to the younger P1 and P2 pupils, which introduced ideas of day and night, seasons and lunar phases. We then switched to the older P3 and above pupils to do a brief tour of the Solar System, followed by a hands-on activity to create a scale model of our 8 planets. We finished the morning by creating planispheres during our Stars and Constellations module, and looked at a few of the more famous constellations that we can see. After lunch, the pupils got out some laptops, and before long, we had them searching for asteroids in real telescope data. We finished the day with a chat about Space Exploration, and what we might expect in the coming years in terms of discovery. A busy day all told, but the pupils enjoyed a detailed look at space.