Give me some space

Beautifully illustrated, this is the story about a girl with a mission: to find life in space. Modelling perseverance, creativity and a spirit for adventure, Una designs and builds her own rocket and goes on a journey through our galaxy, which leads her to the discovery that the other planets might not be as cosy and comfortable as our own boring old Earth.

How would the children prepare for a space mission? What would their rocket look like? How would they take off? Maybe they would like to sketch their ideas and build models. What would they need to wear? What equipment would they need in space? Can they take food?

You might wonder how to investigate space in the hands-on way you can explore many other STEM areas. You can’t even look at the night sky with the children and everything you’d like to explore with them is so far away. As our Early STEM Award winners prove, you can count on the children’s creativity and their love for investigating intergalactic travel and all it involves: Children are, at heart, rocket engineers, space food bag designers , futuristic architects and planetary lifestyle assessors.

Give me some space has a lovely way of introducing scientific vocabulary and facts in the text and illustrations. This is setting a great example of incorporating terminology into the children’s learning experiences in a playful way. In addition to supporting children in familiarising themselves with scientific research methods and engineering practices, we can also give them the terminology to talk about these. Just like in this project, during which the children discovered, similarly to Una, that Earth is perfect for us as it is not too hot and not too cold. They called it the Goldilocks planet. Imagine the joy when they found out that this is a real-life scientific term! Children make important scientific and linguistic discoveries all the time, and we hope you get to celebrate many of these moments together.