That experience [igloos built out of sugar cubes in second grade] became, for me, the touchstone of my teaching. I wanted to give my own students at least one experience that they would remember with the same pride and enthusiasm...

This dream became a reality a few years ago when I taught a 5/6 split. My class, with another at the same grade level, decided to study 'outer space'. This became a total focus in our classrooms for three solid months. Everything we did was motivated by our ever growing list of questions about space...

We had long, seamless, glorious days in which students would zip back and forth ... pursuing the answers to their questions by reading, viewing films, talking with friends, phoning Science Center and Planetarium officials...we planned through the disciplines, looking at space from the viewpoints of artists, science fiction authors, mathematicians, scientists....

The study culminated in an evening called: 'Thornton's Junior Tour of the Universe'. Over 600 people came to our school one evening where they were greeted by sixty student experts clad in specially printed t-shirts...

Guests then wandered outside to the courtyard where they could enjoy student made dinners at the 'Stardust Cafe', watch choral readings and dramatic presentations of pieces such as 'The Judge', or climb the hill to where a group of six volunteers from the Royal Astronomical Society had high-powered scopes set up and ready to point out objects of interest in the night sky...

It was a magical term, culminating in a magical evening. I remember that the next day, my teaching partner and I gave the kids a celebration picnic lunch, complete with a cake that read: 'You were out of this world.'. We sat in silence over lunch; a silence broken as one student after another said,: 'I can't believe we did that. '...

One student put it best by saying: 'A couple of weeks after we started this study, I thought I knew a lot about space. Now I know how much I don't know.'... What worked ... being involved in a large project, that would not normally be expected of someone of that age, and that would be seen by an audience beyond that of teacher, classmates, and even one's own parents....

    by Karen Hume     in Exploring the Stars, email, 1993