Friday 20 March 2015

Solar Eclipse in Year 6!

Today – Friday 20th March – was the day that we had the opportunity to see a once in a life time event: the chance to witness a solar eclipse! Despite the fact that we couldn’t see the totality of the eclipse (we had special safety glasses – remember NEVER look directly at the sun without the correct equipment!), it was still an amazing opportunity to see the beautiful celestial mechanics, and complete some great science work!

The first thing that some of the Year 6 pupils did was to go outside whilst the event was happening and record observations about the temperature, light intensity, cloud cover and unusual occurrences happening before, during & after the eclipse. We repeated the result gathering across the year group to improve the accuracy of the data and then we worked out the average. Crucially, we also made sure that observations took place in the same position to make the investigation as fair as possible!

The next activity was our English and Science cross curricular work. Mr Gale sent a (pretend) ‘angry’ letter to Year 6 to ask us why we had wasted time watching the eclipse when we should have been practising for our SATS instead! We responded with a persuasive letter, convincing Mr Gale that our solar eclipse learning had enhanced our knowledge and that it was a fantastically worthwhile event to witness! Additionally, we read factual texts to improve our understanding of solar eclipses (which were really interesting). Finally we watched lots of great information videos which were very entertaining yet had an outstanding amount of facts for us to learn!


To sum up: this was a remarkable day, which I’m sure we will never forget – particularly as the next picturesque, total eclipse to hit the UK will be in 2090! Also, I’m sure a lot of the knowledge now present in our minds will help us in future lessons!

Thanks for reading!!
Amy.

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