It was a joy to work with 125 Year 5 children on the Isle of Sheppey in Kent exploring and celebrating the Sun. We spent a day each at West Minster and Rose Street Primary Schools.
Questions
Each day began with the children answering two questions: "What does the Sun mean to you?" and "What does the Sun give us?". Some of their answers are shown here.
A talk
Professor Helen Mason of Cambridge gave a Zoom talk about the Sun, covering its age, temperature, and phenomena like sunspots, solar flares, and eclipses. She introduced famous scientists, such as Newton and Galileo. She also explained that there is light beyond the visible, including infrared and ultraviolet
The surface of the Sun from NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory.
. The children asked many interesting questions:
How stars form, which happens when gas and dust coalesce under gravity to form a dense core where fusion begins.
What would happen if a black hole swallowed the Sun? (It can swallow stars, but the Sun is fortunately too far away from any black holes).
Could we use satellite materials to travel close to the Sun.?
Since Earth is protected from radiation by its magnetic field and atmosphere, are we at risk when traveling into space?
Would life exist on Earth if we did not have our magnetic shield?
The possibility of life in space, with the Mars rover indicating water but no life yet found.
poetry
Kulvinder Johal of the Primary Science Teaching Trust, led sessions on poetry writing. The children created a word bank of words relating to the Sun and learnt about poetic devices like similes, metaphors, personification and alliteration. They drafted a personification or acrostic poem on a wipeable board to focus on spelling and grammar before writing their poems on paper, adding drawings to complete their work.
“SIZZLING SUN
The sun wakes up and stretches wide.
Golden rays dancing side to side.
Smiling down at the Earth from up high, sizzling like a grill.
Dancing through planets with a smile.
Making many people excited with the hotness.
A growing artist, bold and grand.
At dusk, it waves and takes its rest.
Sleeping soundly in the west.”
Making Art
Artist Clare Dudeney and I gave a presentation about the African-American artist Alma Thomas. After retiring from teaching, Alma devoted her life to painting and developed a unique style using dots, dashes, and rectangles of paint that dance across the canvas. Her artworks are displayed in leading galleries and museums.
Geraldine sharing Alma’s work.
The children observed that Alma Thomas’s paintings are full of vibrant, abstract patterns that evoke various ideas and feelings. They noticed that her work often resembles a rainbow or mosaic, with bold colours arranged like puzzle pieces. The paintings reminded them of nature, the Sun, stars in space, rockets, eyes and boats in the sea. The pupils noted the importance of the white spaces in her paintings, which make the colours more vivid and add depth, creating optical illusions, and they can appear like infinite stars. They admired Alma’s careful mark-making, which looks like small squares or bricks, and how she layers colour.
We created colourful and imaginative sun catchers with tissue paper, that we mounted on the windows in a joyful exhibition. Here are glimpses of their creations.
The children quietly explored their exhibition. Many presented a piece created by someone else that they found particularly inspiring.
Feedback
In their feedback the children said, “I enjoyed all of it. I think every part was good in its own way”. Many felt inspired by learning about space and being creative, particularly enjoying abstract art and poetry. They felt proud of their work, especially when sharing it with others: “I liked how everyone had their own ideas”. Some found parts of the art activity challenging, such as sticking pieces together, coming up with a theme, feeling stressed about time constraints, or finding the materials messy. There were a few pupils with special educational requirements and disabilities, they engaged with the activities well and made fantastic works.
Excitement
At the end there was much excitement and curiosity as everyone received a UV bracelet gift with beads that change colour, even on a cloudy day, due to the invisible ultraviolet light from the Sun.
Appreciation
Thank you to the year 5 children and teachers of West Minster and Rose Street Primary Schools. And to the team: Solar physicist Professor Helen Mason, Kulvinder Johal of Primary Science Teaching Trust, and artist Clare Dudeney. The project was part of the SunSpaceArt initiative.