Space facts primary resource

Understand more about our solar system with these fun facts!

This primary resource introduces children to ideas about our solar system, to help them understand more about the size, scale, time and relative motion within it. How many stars is the Milky Way made up of? What vegetable have astronauts grown in space? What animals have been to space?

Pupils will have the opportunity to consider Earth’s place within the Solar System and the Universe in our National Geographic Kids’ Space primary resource sheet.

The teaching resource can be used in study group tasks, as a printed handout for each pupil, or for display on the interactive whiteboard.

Activity: Ask children to further research some of the facts included in the resource. Pupils could use their research to write a factsheet about their favourite fact on the sheet.

N.B. The following information for mapping the resource documents to the school curriculum is specifically tailored to the English National Curriculum and Scottish Curriculum for Excellence. We are currently working to bring specifically tailored curriculum resource links for our other territories; including South Africa, Australia and New Zealand. If you have any queries about our upcoming curriculum resource links, please email: schools@ngkids.co.uk

This Science primary resource assists with teaching the following Upper Key Stage 2 Science (Year 5) objectives from the National Curriculum:

Pupils should be taught to:

describe the movement of the Earth, and other planets, relative to the Sun in the solar system

Pupils should learn that the Sun is a star at the centre of our solar system and that it has eight planets: Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune (Pluto was reclassified as a ‘dwarf planet’ in 2006).

This Science primary resource assists with teaching the following Sciences Second level objectives from the Scottish Curriculum for Excellence:

By observing and researching features of our solar system, I can use simple models to communicate my understanding of size, scale, time and relative motion within it.

Scottish Curriculum for Excellence Sciences Third level objectives:

By using my knowledge of our solar system and the basic needs of living things, I can produce a reasoned argument on the likelihood of life existing elsewhere in the universe.

Scottish Curriculum for Excellence Sciences Fourth level objectives: