Monday 19 March 2012 Fashion fit for the final frontier was on the curriculum when year 5 pupils from Rawdon St Peter’s Church of England Primary School paid a visit to The Grammar School at Leeds (GSAL) Junior School. To mark National Science & Engineering Week (NSEW) and in keeping with the week’s theme of ‘Our world in motion’, GSAL hosted a spacesuit workshop for the pupils to find out how to create utility clothing that is out of this world. Working in teams, the children learnt that spacesuits must be able to cope with extremes of temperature, resistant to meteorites, and absorbent enough to stay dry when the wearer was caught short. They conducted hands on experiments to test which colours retain heat, how syphoning water around the body can regulate temperature, and put some well-known nappy brands to the test. Mrs Clare Oddy, Year 5 class teacher at Rawdon St Peter’s, said, “From the minute we arrived the children integrated and started working in teams made up of pupils from both schools. They are getting a lot out of the day’s activities – teamwork, how to plan an experiment, learn the science behind it and get reliable results. The pupils have taken the lead in all the activities, working out their own way to complete the tasks.” The spacesuit workshop was the culmination of NSEW in Junior School at GSAL, where the timetable had been devoted all week to science activities. General Primary News
