Conkers and Climate Change
Kapok explored how capturing the optimum amount of sun from the solar system is the best way for life to thrive on earth, and how low carbon footprints can reduce the impact of human-made global warming. They then played conkers, a very low carbon footprint game.
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Kapok Explore The Mind Boggling Scale of Our Solar System, Which In Turn Is Just A Tiny Speck Compared To The Known Universe...
After having made choices on how to adapt the full-scale data, children drew chalk circle representations of the size of the different planets. They decided it would be very difficult indeed to chalk to-scale representations of the distances between the planets and the size of the planets in the playground, as the distances are so much greater. This was especially the case as we were working under the playground’s roof with the rainy conditions. The class also felt scaling the sun would have been challenging, given that 1,300,000 earths could fit into our sun. The class were also amazed to know this is a fairly small sun compared to the some of suns in the known universe and there are more suns in the known universe than grains of sand on earth! Each sun has the possibility of supporting life on planets that are the optimum distance from it (the Goldilocks Zone) and with the right atmospheric conditions.
Astronaut Training - Kapok Have What It Takes!
Using the Chris Hadfield program, ‘Astronaut Training: Do You Have What It Takes?’ , children reflected on the importance of various tests candidates for the International Space Station might do and did their best to replicate these in the classroom, evaluating their performance afterwards. For example, tests include speed origami (for precision), reciting a list of numbers backwards with physical distraction (for multi-tasking precisely), various sensory distortion tests (as space is full of sensory distortions), the beep test (for physical fitness), remote control of devices (a skill needed to power the Mars Rover), judging three minutes with your eyes shut doing and undoing your shoe laces/ taking on and off your shoes (time judgement in space is vital), communication challenges such as communicating without speech or only talking back-to-back (as social skills are vital on a small space station) and language learning (while we focused on German where Mr Smith – pretty much - only spoke German all afternoon on International Languages Day, the international space station language is Russian)