Space Agent – Build a Rocket

22nd December 201513th July 2018

The final mission and Elsa has been looking forward to this one the most 🙂

For the final time, we watched Jon’s introduction video. Apparently Little Jon is doing a secret mission.

Science

How does gravity work on earth?

We watched some videos about Isaac Newton, forces and gravity. Then did an experiment using a jar and ball to see if we could cause enough pull to keep the ball in the jar. Elsa wrote what was happening and why and spoke about it as we were doing it and we did a video of it to upload to makewaves.

Mission 6 Part 1 complete

DT & Maths

This task needed us to design and launch our own rocket. After looking at various different ways to do it, Elsa decided to use a bottle and make a cone to create hers.

Firstly she made a cone out of card and taped it up using parcel tape, she then taped it to the bottom of her bottle and decorated the whole thing.

She then put a bit of playdough around the open end as a weight and taped it on.

Tah Dah, all finished.

To launch it she was going to use force from the pump and water.

We used between 100ml and 400ml of water for the launches to see which one would work best. Our results were the less water used, the higher and further the rocket went. We uploaded a video to makewaves.

Mission 6 Part 2 complete

English

Write a letter of support to Tim?

Last task of the challenge was to write a letter in letter format, using full stops, commas and a variety of vocabulary to Tim and post it to him for his return.

Elsa wrote a bit about what she had learned and that she had watched the launch and docking of the Soyus rocket on the 15th December and that she thought the docking would be frightening for them all. She wished him a good mission. 🙂

Mission 6 Part 3 complete

She uploaded all of her work and was issued with not only the launch rocket badge,

but she has also qualified as an Agent of UNSA

This has been a brilliant, interesting project.

Space Cadet – Living in Space

21st December 201513th July 2018

Mission 5 and it’s the penultimate Mission. This time it was split into Science, Maths and English again.

As always, we watched Jon’s video, this weeks was a little bit sadder as Mini Jon Space Cadet had gone missing. 🙁

Science

How do we measure a day?

We watched several interesting videos which explained about how the sun affected days and nights on earth.

Elsa and I discussed this and then she drew a picture which showed how this happens and described about the earth revolving on it’s axis affected where it was night and day.

Mission 5 Part 1 Complete

Maths

How does your day on Earth compare to an astronauts on the ISS?

Elsa know that on the ISS they see a sunrise and sunset every 45 minutes and that they need to sleep to regular time as opposed to following them.

We were given information about what the astronauts do in a 24 hour period and Elsa had to work out her own day, then compare the two. She chose to do a bar chart as it was easier to see the differences. She then wrote about them on the makewaves website.

Mission 5 Part 2 Complete

English

How can you support Tim?

To complete this task we were asked to do this is a blog so Elsa created a blog post on this website.

Tim’s Blog

I then tweeted the link to Tim and he ‘liked’ it 🙂

Mission 5 Part 3 Complete

Elsa uploaded all her work to the Makewaves website and has been awarded her badge.

Living in Space

Christmas Fun – Gingerbread House

11th December 201513th July 2018

Anna attends nursery and their school encouraged all the children to decorate a gingerbread house (which they had made at school).

Both girls enjoyed doing this although gluing it together is great fun. 🙂 We ended up using superglue to stick the roof on. Glue was a last resort as the icing and melted sugar hadn’t worked.

We used royal icing to stick a variety of sweets on it.

We decorated the roof with crushed up shredded wheat.

The end result. It looked great.

Such a shame it wasn’t edible. 🙁

Christmas Fun – Sock Snowmen

10th December 201513th July 2018

I love the run up to Christmas, we get all festive and do lots of lovely crafts. The internet is such a fabulous source of information, you can never run out of ideas.

After seeing this cute little video on You Tube, we decided to give these lovely little snowmen a try.

Firstly, cut off the foot part just above the heel then fill the foot part with rice (or whatever you want).

Tie some cotton to make a head and body.

Glue on buttons, eyes and nose.

Then put the top half of the sock on as the hat. (easy peasy).

The finished items look so cute 🙂

Space Cadet – Astro Coding

2nd December 201513th July 2018

Week 4, I can’t believe how fast it’s going, and to be honest, this week was the one I was most nervous about, to the point I completed the weeks tasks in case Elsa needed more input from me to help her.

I needn’t have worried, of course, children these days are so competent on computers aren’t they?

As normal, the girls watched the Space Shed video at the beginning of the week 🙂 these are a source of amusement, they just find Jon, so funny, with his biscuits and tea.

This week instead of being separated into Maths, English and Science, it was all Science and Computing.

Mission 4 Part 1

What is HTML and CSS?

Firstly, Elsa looked at the relevant cards relating to HTML and CSS and then looked at the differences. She concluded that HTML ‘puts bits on the page like headers, lists, paragraphs, pictures and links‘ and CSS ‘makes it look prettier by changing the font, colour, size, position, putting borders on it, and adding background colours‘.

Next we had to print out a safe webpage (we did our Space Weather page) and she had to decide which parts of it were HTML and which parts of it were CSS.

Mission 4 Part 2

How can I write with HTML and CSS?

Elsa realised that there are certain codes used to add the various different types of HTML and they all needed < > around them and that to add CSS it needed { } around it. She wrote it down, but really couldn’t wait to do the next part.

Mission 4 Part 3

How can I build a webpage for Tim Peake and edit it?

We created a CodePen account as suggested and were given the HTML and CSS to use to create Tim a webpage. CodePen is great as you can see your edits as you make them which makes little people extremely happy. First you see a boring black header, then after a bit of CSS you see an orange header in the middle of a blue bordered background. 🙂

Tim’s Completed Webpage using HTML and CSS

Tim's webpage

After completing Tim’s webpage, Elsa decided that she would like to create an All About Me (her) page, which she thoroughly enjoyed doing as well as she could make it totally girly. 🙂

About Me

Elsa has worked really hard at this task and really enjoyed it. She has completed it and been awarded with her badge.

Alphabet Photograph Challenge – Part 1

29th November 201513th July 2018

Elsa has a camera, which she takes with her everywhere. Sometimes she remembers to take photographs and other times she doesn’t.

To encourage her to look at her surroundings and to remind her to take pictures, I set her a challenge.

By the end of our home school year could we each have a set of alphabet photographs taken of items we see while we are out. They can be of anything but it has to look like a letter of the alphabet.

This little challenge seems to be working as these are what she has found so far.

E H I

L O R

V W X

Y Z

I think she’s doing ok :).

Space Cadet – Fit For Space

28th November 201513th July 2018

Week 3 of the UNSA missions and this week is about food and exercise on the ISS.

Firstly, as usual, it was watching the introduction video with Jon. We always find these funny in our house.

Science

What would Tim need to eat before doing a spacewalk (EVA – Extra Vehicular Activity)

We looked at the table of food we needed to download and finally (again after a grumble to HE friends about not being able to make a 4000 kcal meal) worked out that you only needed to do an extra meal on top of 2500 kcal day for Tim if he was to do an EVA).

Elsa watched a video of Tim talking about his favourite foods and also a video of Samantha talking about snacks on board too. After watching these she chose a meal that she hoped Tim would like. (Loads of chocolate and tea) :). She labelled it with the number of calories per item of food.

Mission 3 Part 1 Complete

Maths

Using the table of food provided, work out how much Tim’s meal would cost:

per meal
once a week for 6 weeks
once a week for 6 months (24 weeks)

Mission 3 Part 2 Complete

English

Persuade UNSA’s Head Chef to choose your meal.

Elsa had to decide why her meal was better than anyone else’s and to try and persuade the head chef to choose it. She wrote her own text then did a talk to us about it.

Untitled-1

Elsa work has uploaded her work and she has been awarded with her badge.

What was nice about after completing this mission, Elsa received an extra badge which was a surprise when she next logged into Makewaves. 🙂

Diwali

22nd November 201513th July 2018

Another subject Elsa asked to do back in the summer was Diwali. I know she had covered it at school, so I asked her why she wanted to do it again. She explained she found it interesting. 🙂

I found out it was on 11th November this year so we started the topic the week previous.

I thought it was would be best to find out why Diwali is celebrated so we watched a video and read a story. To make sure Elsa had remembered this, I asked her to filled in some worksheets I’d downloaded from Activity Village and Twinkl, while Anna completed a maze.

We then made Diya’s out of beads (from Activity Village) and clay.

We talked about henna patterns and both Elsa and Anna created one on paper then painted it onto their arms with face paints.

We made lanterns 🙂

We also discussed Rangoli patterns, where they are used and why and then both girls coloured one in downloaded from Twinkl.

Finally we made coconut squares.

An interesting week of learning 🙂

Roots and Greens

20th November 201513th July 2018

N arranged another foraging trip, this time near her home, which turned out to be in the middle of nowhere. This time it wasn’t for mushrooms (apart from this one, which looks like ears, is called jelly fungus and is edible).

It was looking for roots and greens to add to a soup she had made earlier.

We all made our way up to this fabulous outdoor campfire where N asked the children to find some more sticks to put on the fire. She then described a few root edibles she had found (Alexander and horseradish). Some of the other HE children helped wrap them in foil and N put them on the fire to cook.

N gave the children a pointed stick each and tasked them with digging up some wild carrots with them. They look nothing like carrots, but smell exactly like them.

We then continued to walk around the land and found some ground ivy and white dead nettle, both of which are edible and the leaves went into the soup.

We walked down to the allotment and there found an Asian pear tree. They look exactly like apples but tasted just like a pear.

We went back to the campfire and chopped up the different green leaves we had found and added them to the soup.

Finally, it was time for drinks, oatcakes and crabapple jelly and soup.

Another fun, interesting and wet day.

Space Cadet – Space Weather

19th November 201513th July 2018

Onto mission 2 of the space challenge which is about space weather.

Firstly, we watched Mission 2 introduction video from Jon. Both girls are enjoying these videos 🙂

Science

What is space weather?

We decided to do this as a document this time to make a change and to use the PC. We used the suggested NASA space weather page for the information on this question. We found images to paste into the document and Elsa wrote in her own words about it.

Among other things, we found out:

what the sun is made of;
what causes the northern lights;
what a solar flare is;
how the space weather affects the earth and equipment here.

We watched a couple of interesting videos, one to do with the telescopes taking images of the weather in space and a brilliant National Geographic one on Aurora Borealis (northern lights).

Mission 2 Part 1 Complete

Maths

Sunspots

We talked about what sunspots were and looked at some images online of what they look like. Then we looked at and chatted about the data for the mission. I discussed with Elsa what she needed to do with it.

find the errors in the data.
choose 3 facts about the data (highest, lowest, total number over the 10 years she chose).
choose 10 years to study and create into a chart.
write 2 questions about her data for someone else to answer. 🙂

Mission 2 Part 2 Complete

English

Present information about space weather and sunspots to your peers (dad).

Elsa decided that the best way to do this, (after a discussion with other HE children doing this challenge), was by creating a PowerPoint presentation. I asked her to think about what she felt was important to tell him then suggested pictures and bullet points to remind her what to say. I said that he may have questions to ask her during and after the talk, so she should be sure she had covered as much as she could initially, but I did say I would give her key words to remind her of the information if he asked her something she couldn’t answer.

She created 4 slides and searched for relevant pictures and remembered information from the previous 2 tasks. When Daddy got back from work she asked him to sit down and started to talk about:

what space weather is.
how it affects those on earth and on the ISS.
what protection is available.
how we can predict it.
what sunspots are.

Dad asked her a few questions which she was able to answer without my help. 🙂

She did really well.

Mission 2 Part 3 Complete

Elsa’s work has been uploaded and she has been awarded with her badge.

Home School Journal

Author: hsj.rlf

Space Agent – Build a Rocket

Space Cadet – Living in Space

Christmas Fun – Gingerbread House

Christmas Fun – Sock Snowmen

Space Cadet – Astro Coding

Alphabet Photograph Challenge – Part 1

Space Cadet – Fit For Space

Diwali

Roots and Greens

Space Cadet – Space Weather