Piwakawaka and the Peacock.

It sounds like some strange fairy tale, doesn't it? But it's definitely non-fiction. 

Last Tuesday the tamariki of Space Module Piwakawaka (that's Rūma Piwakawaka in earthling language) had a virtual meeting with a real live Space Engineer, Lisa Peacocke. Lisa has been working on the Mars Missions, and has a huge wealth of space knowledge, some of which she shared with us. We were all pretty excited about meeting with Lisa, and I am the first to admit that I did not leave people a 5-second pause to respond to questions...sorry. We're all learning! The tamariki took the opportunity to ask some BIG questions. 

Behold, the recording of our meeting with Space Engineer Lisa Peacocke. (If you can't quite hear the tamariki speaking in the video, don't worry, Lisa was able to hear, and she repeats the question as she answers it).

Moon, Mars, and Microgravity.

Yesterday we learned about all the different layers of earth's atmosphere. The I.S.S. is in the THERMOSPHERE, about 440 km away from us. Here is some of our maths about that - the 4 tamariki are standing on the edge of the EXOSPHERE, which is much thicker than all the other layers of our atmosphere.

Today we had a quick look at how far it is from Earth to the moon and Mars. They are MUCH further away than the ISS. The moon is over 400,000 km away from us, and Mars is 67 MILLION km away! 

This means that, travelling by rocket, it takes about 2 days to get from Earth to the ISS, about 3 days to reach the moon - and 6 - 7 months to reach Mars! There is SO much exciting learning to be done about Mars... but we are going to stick with our ISS learning. If you want to learn more about Mars with your tamariki, this is a great place to start: NASA Mars for Kids

Finally, we bamboozled ourselves by starting to learn about microgravity. Watch this video and see how much information you can 'catch' - it sure is a curious concept!

Astronauts of the Galaxy!!

 We are learning about space. We found a cool app that lets us become astronauts and choose a star cluster as the background. We can also find out about the star clusters through the app. The names are really cool - for example Cat's Paw Nebula and Coyote Head Nebula. We haven't take photos of everyone yet. We will try to take more every day.

How they eat, drink and live on the International Space Station

 We had a very interesting Friday morning learning about how astronauts eat, drink and live on the International Space Station. We are learning to 'catch' the information we hear and then to write it down in note form. This can be hard when there are lots of new words and we sometimes get distracted when we start giggling about toilets in space... Here is the video we've been watching, we'd love to watch it again with our whānau at home.

Maths and Writing with Whaea Tiff is out of this world!

 Literally... for the first 4 weeks of school we are going to be learning all about the International Space Station. This will involve maths and writing, and a whole lot uf fun. On Wednesday morning of week 3, we will listen as an astronaut on the ISS reads a book to us, LIVE on air! Here is the plan for our learning, be sure to check back on this blog to share our discoveries.