Display – Space

I was able to attend the Year 6 camp to Canberra last year and by far and away my favourite stop on the busy tour was the Deep Space Centre at the Canberra Deep Space Communications Complex. Regaled by stories of the space missions currently in space, the science behind the search for life on Mars, and the vastness of the universe, we sat under a giant model of the solar system, next to a model of Rover Curiosity and were shown pictures of Mars’s most recent sunrise. We were given the links to help scientists categories galaxies and basically I was just in nerd heaven. Creating a space display went straight to the top of my to-do list.

I wanted the main wall display to look like a scientist’s blackboard. I took photocopies (no more than 1 or 2 pages from each book) from a range of non-fiction, biographies and picture books about space. I also included the book covers, to provide attribution, but to also encourage students to read and borrow these titles. I trimmed and then stuck my copies onto a giant spread of black display paper ($10 from Modern Teaching Aids) and added headings, notes and diagram labels with a white paint pen.

The display is 3.5 metres long and I used two sheets to get the width I needed. Blu tak is currently holding it up (fingers cross it holds throughout the term).

I also created a solar system to hang from the ceiling out of paper lanterns. The larger lanterns came from Big W and the smaller from Modern Teaching Aids. After creating my sun and Jupiter I found out that Bunnings has an even larger size that I would have loved to use for the Sun and big planets. Oh well. I should have also used a smaller size lantern for the moon. It is currently driving the students nuts that the moon is the same size as Earth. 🙂

I created the sun by cutting strips of tissue paper and frilling the edges and gluing it to the lantern. The moon was wrapped in al-foil. The rest were painted with whatever paint I had on hand.

The entrance to the room boasts beautiful space-themed letters from Instant Display. 

I made a sun and a moon using the same techniques (tissue paper and al-foil) as on the lanterns but on big semi-circles of paper.

We’ve put a lot of space books on display around the room and they just keep getting borrowed!! Lucky we have a large collection.

We also have a rocket ship reading nook in construction. I’ll update this post if we get it finished (COVID has delayed building).

The plan was to run space themed activities during makerspace, but COVID happened, so we will have to wait and see what happens. At least I got the display up early, so students could enjoy it before leaving for holidays and COVID.

What else could we add to our space display?