“Houston, we’ve had a problem here!” Space Day – History

Year 5 have blasted off into space and have kicked off our Science and History topic of ‘Space’ with a Space Race Day.  

On Friday 8th Sept, Carroll (Mrs Robson) and Lewis (Mrs Allen) classes were enthralled to learn all about the race for space superiority. 

We learnt about the USSR and the USA and their respective astronauts and cosmonauts. 

We found that the Soviet Union were in fact were the first to send a man to space and place a satellite into orbit, however the USA were the first to the moon. We learnt about Buzz Aldrin, Michael Collins and Neil Armstrong and their moon walk in 1969 (Apollo 11). We discussed the fact that we recognise the Americans as the ‘winners’ but many children felt that in fact, the Soviet Union had entered space first! 

The historical significance of the space race was our focus for the day. Your children should be able to list a long list of the technological advances that we use daily now because of this race for space superiority. Formula milk, freeze-dried foods, satellite navigation (maps!), mobile phones, NIKE Air trainers are only a few from the excessive list. We used a historical timeline to see how recently all of these historical moments happened and found that they are all very recent advances. 

In the afternoon, the children held their very own space race.

Lewis Class were the USSR and Carroll Class were Team NASA. Lewis were of course determined to prove that sending a man to space first makes them the winners, but alas history repeated itself when Chase, Maiya, Amy and Matilda J from Carroll Class (NASA) won the distance competition and sent their rocket the furthest during testing in Houston Texas (aka the school field). 

A big thank-you goes to Jay Marrs and the STEM team at RAF Odiham for bringing the children’s learning to life and providing us with their paper rocket launcher and astronaut training along the way for Mrs Robson and Mrs Allen! More thanks go to Mrs Ray and Mrs Allen for planning an excellent immersive experience for the children to learn about history in a fun and exciting way. 

Well done Team USSR and Team NASA you did us proud today and hopefully made lots of educational memories for your futures. 

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