Exploration Space! Ok, that just means space exploration, but how cool will that sound to your middle school students? The space unit is one of my favorites! Students learn all about the Earth-Moon-Sun systems, why there are seasons, what causes tides, phases of The Moon, causes of eclipses, the solar system, planets, Earth as the Goldilocks planet, and space exploration. Is space exploration important? This is a question that you can help your students to answer in your space exploration lesson plans.
In this post, I will share 3 different ideas that you can use to start out your lesson and hype your students up. Second, I will share an interactive lesson that you can use with your students to help them to reduce the overwhelming amount of knowledge there is surrounding why exploring space is important. Lastly, I will share 3 ideas to help your students widen their knowledge even further about this topic. This is the WOW Factor exploration space esson plan.
Introductory Space Exploration Activities
I’ve mentioned this before. Although I love the topic of the exploration of space and you might too, some of your students may not share that same passion. Your job is to get them hyped up about learning and to be internally motivated to gain more knowledge. Help them to WONDER.
I have 3 ideas that you can try in your class. Choose one or all. It’s up to you!
Space Exploration Discussion
If you are looking for something easy and not too time consuming, this is your activity! Just have a discussion with your students. So, how do you begin?
- Give each student a post-it note.
- On the board, write the question: What are 3 benefits of space exploration?
- Have students to jot down their ideas on their post-it note.
- Have students bring their post-it notes to the board.
- Review answers quickly and talk about patterns, interesting thoughts, etc.
Make sure that you don’t do all of the talking. Let your students have discussions. You can choose to have one student volunteer to come up, look for patterns, and start the discussion.
Watch a Movie about Space
I don’t think you should watch movies every day in class, but I definitely think that they have their place and can be very important in your classroom. To get them hyped up about the topic, watch a movie before your lesson about space!
There are a lot of good movies about space, but they may not all be good for middle school.
Here are my suggestions.
Hidden Figures (lots of interdisciplinary connections!)
As I mentioned, there are a lot of other cool movies that you might can check out with your older middle school students. I tend to stay on the safe side and watch movies that are G or PG!
Exploration Space Recent Events
One thing that always gets middle school students excited is when you discuss something that completely and directly relates to their lives. Remember, middle school students feel like the world revolves around them. Really!
So, before beginning your unit, talk about the most recent event that is happening in space exploration. How is THIS event going to impact their lives in the future? How exciting is it that THEY are in this part of history? This is HUGE!
It really is. Think about how people felt the first time that we landed on the Moon. What about those that were there when Sputnik launched?
There is a lot of cool stuff happening at the time that I’m writing this post. Just the other day, the Artemis I, NASAs most powerful moon rocket ever, launched! That is HUGE. This could be great to discuss with your students. Maybe it will be easier to travel to the Moon when they are older. There are SO many things to discuss.
Maybe your students are more interested in the exploration occurring on Mars! See what brings them joy and go in that direction!
Space Exploration Lesson to Overcome Overwhelm
Interactive lessons are one of my favorite ways to deliver material. They can be used for direct instruction, small groups, self-directed learning, flipped classrooms, review, and more!
They can fit with the majority of teaching styles. I love these because they help students remember content and are more likely to store it in their long-term memory because they help reduce cognitive load. How do these lessons do that? The content is purposefully divided into chunks with embedded questions for students to process chunks of information at a time.
This works better than giving students all of the information at once and then having to process it collectively.
There are also other researched-based strategies included that will help students understand and retain information.
This particular Space Exploration lesson covers different types of space craft and some of the most influential and recent space missions including the Pioneer and Voyager Probes, WMAP, Hubble Space Telescope, James Webb Space Telescope, Artemis, and the Perseverance Rover.
Your students will LOVE this and will be engaged.
There are interactive activities inside including a KWL to start, exploring outside resources, vocabulary matching, and more!
You can also find this on TPT.
Activities to Explore Space Exploration Technologies
At this point, your students have already learned a lot about past space exploration and exploration that is still continuing today. It’s absolutely amazing exploring the world beyond. There is so much to learn about all of those other rocks out there!
Of course, we can’t learn everything there is to know, but there are fun ways to explore this topic further and help students widen their understanding.
Here are some fun ideas to add to those space travel lesson plans!
Design a Rover
Want to add more STEM challenges to your classroom? Here’s the one! What’s the task? Think of an imaginary planet. What’s it made of? What is the terrain like? Where’s it at? How long does it take to get there?
Once you have decided what your imaginary planet is, share this planet with your students.
Now, what’s their job? They must design a rover to explore that planet. Based on the lesson, they should have an idea of what a rover is, how they have been used, and be aware of some of the features that rovers have.
Allow your students to get into groups and first draw a blueprint of their rover.
If time allows, get some materials, and have students create a model of the rover!
You can grade them based on:
- creativity
- accuracy
- relation to content
- adaption to terrain
- visually appealing
They’ll have fun with this one! Through this, they can answer the question, Why does space exploration lead to new technology?
Major Mission Project
In the lesson, students were introduced to different space missions throughout history. This is their opportunity to explore a mission that they are interested in a little further.
This is a great jigsaw activity as well.
Have students to choose their favorite mission and explore it further.
They should create some type of presentation. It could be a:
- poster
- greenscreen report
- a slides presentation
- brochure
- essay
- poem
- puppet show
- you name it!
Whatever creative way that they would like to present about their mission, allow it!
Space Exploration Timeline
Another fun idea is to create a HUGE timeline to display in the school hallway. You can choose to have students explore events to whatever extent that you’d like, or you can just use the ones you covered in class.
Have groups of students create a poster of a space mission, or a few. Collectively figure out which order they occurred in.
Take these out in the hallway with some painters tape and create a huge timeline of events! This is a great way to explain space exploration in a new way.
I don’t have a resource created for this, but there are some ones out there that you can use.
Help your students master science content!
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