Almost a whole year has passed since we started Theme English and what progress everyone has made!

For their final theme the 5th and 6th grade studied space, a topic that everyone was really enthusiastic about. Since the 5th and 6th graders had already studied space in their regular theme they already had a lot of knowledge about the topic, so the main problem was being able to express this information in English.

We started off by learning the names of the planets in our solar system, which almost immediately lead to a heated discussion about whether we should include Pluto as a planet after it was recently demoted to a “dwarf planet.” The decision was that Pluto would not be included in the list to stick with scientific knowledge. As well as learning the names of the planets we realized that we needed other vocabulary to be able to explain the characteristics of each planet to others, from colours to rock and gas compounds. The biggest challenge came when trying to express size and distance from the sun, i.e. big numbers.

Can you say 57,910,000 in English?

The answer is fifty seven million nine hundred and ten thousand and by the way this is the distance between the Sun and Mercury!

After learning the necessary vocabulary and watching some educational programs about the solar system we had to think of an easy and effective way to express the information we had learnt about the solar system. The class came up with 3 ideas: make a poster, make a to-scale model or make some kind of computer graphic. After much discussion and debate the class decided to make the second idea, a to-scale model. This involved a lot of complicated calculations to work out the scale, but eventually we knew how big to make the planets and how far they should be placed from the sun but also meant that everyone could express their artistic side.

Everyone was given 2 planets to make and we started by making spheres from polystyrene and colouring them appropriate colours. Then we had to work out how to attach the planets at the correct distance from the sun, which was ingeniously overcome by the use of sticks with planets place at the end to the scale we had made!

The end product was a true masterpiece (even though it toppled over a couple of times) and everyone even managed to complete their short piece explaining about the planets they were in charge of.

For the 5th graders space is definitely not the final frontier, more themes await them in 6th grade. For the 6th grade space may be the final frontier at TCS but more exciting things lie in store.