Key Stage Two children went on a space themed learning journey to find out more about our new exciting initiative at Park Road Community Primary School. 

The special space themed day for Year 3 , 4 ,5 and 6 was held to launch the school’s new High Performance Learning (HPL), which uses a range of different values to help us all achieve exciting new things using the ‘everybody can’ approach. 

During the day children learnt all about what HPL means for our school using a number of different activities. 

Year 6 children were given a rocket ticket and went on a journey to the Moon! They wrote informal journalistic reports based on the idea of using HPL skills to create rockets.  They used creativity to make Moon paintings and poems called 'Six ways to look at the Moon'. Using perseverance and resilience, they also used protractors and their knowledge of angles to create sundials. 

During the day Year 6 also created a dance to Chris Hadfield's version of Space Oddity and using a variety of skills and competencies such as perseverance, open minded, risk taking and patience, created a lunar landing module. The children also used collaboration to measure diameters of the craters on the Moon in a Science experiment.

Year 5 focused on creativity and collaboration to create the four phases of the moon. They also looked at what qualities are needed to go on a mission to Mars, focusing on the values of confidence (to sell ourselves) and enquiry (looking into what skills we possess) and wrote an application. 

Year 4 applied for different jobs in space thinking about what skills we would need and also designed their own planets using creativity and originality. 

Year 3 started off the day by reading about Katherine Johnson who was the first black woman to work at NASA. She helped to calculate the flight plan for Apollo 13 and was crucial in helping mission control to safely return the astronauts to earth after a catastrophic malfunction during the Apollo 13 mission. The children explored what HPL skills Katherine, the astronauts and mission control demonstrated throughout the mission. Year 3 decided they all showed resilience, courage, determination, great leadership and collaboration as well as trust. The class then designed a planet that they would like to visit as an astronaut and wrote a poem to describe it.

What a great day! 

You can read more about what we are doing on our High Performance Learning journey here.