Our January Lessons
Room 12 · Fourth Grade · the week of January 28

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This is the week as I teach it now, after thirteen Januarys of trying things. It fits in social studies, science and language arts, so I don't lose a week of anything. Take what you can use. Every activity here works with a class of twenty-five and costs less than ten dollars, and most cost nothing.

A word first. Fourth graders are nine and ten. Some of them will ask hard questions, usually on the first day, usually right before lunch. I answer simply and honestly, and when I don't know, I say so. I tell them that the crew knew flying was risky and went anyway because they thought it was worth doing, and that the people who build rockets learned from what went wrong. We spend the week on how the seven lived. That is where the lessons are.

I move the quiet minute to whatever school day January 28 falls on. This coming year it is a Friday, which works out nicely.

Seven Desks

I push the desks into seven islands and tape a crew member's name to each one. Every child draws a name out of my coffee can, so nobody picks the teacher on purpose. Each team spends the week becoming the class experts on one person: where they grew up, what they studied, what they did before they were astronauts, and one thing about them that wasn't about space. The librarian pulls every book and magazine article we have, and I keep a folder of newspaper clippings from 1986 that the children handle like museum pieces. On Friday each team stands at its island and teaches the rest of us. The posters stay up until spring.

The Hometown Map

We put a pin in the big pull-down map for each hometown and run yarn from every pin to the Kennedy Space Center: Cle Elum, Washington; Beaufort, North Carolina; Akron, Ohio; Kona, Hawaii; Lake City, South Carolina; Detroit and Mohawk, New York, for Greg Jarvis; Boston and Concord, New Hampshire, for Christa McAuliffe. Then we measure the yarn against the map's scale and figure out who came the farthest. (Hawaii wins, every year, and every year somebody argues for Washington.) It's a geography lesson and an arithmetic lesson, and it shows the children that the crew came from towns like theirs.

The Cold Morning

This is the science lesson, and the one they remember. You need a handful of rubber O-rings from the plumbing aisle at the hardware store, two small C-clamps, a bowl of ice water and a bowl of warm tap water.

1. Squeeze an O-ring flat in each clamp.
2. Put one clamp in the ice water and one in the warm water. Wait five minutes. (Have them predict what will happen, in writing, in their journals.)
3. Take both out, loosen the clamps at the same moment, and watch. The warm ring springs right back to round. The cold ring comes back slowly, and you can see the difference.

Then I explain that the joints in the shuttle's boosters were sealed with rings like these, only enormous, and that a seal has to spring back fast to do its job. The temperature at the launch that morning was 36 degrees, colder than for any shuttle launch before it. A famous physicist, Richard Feynman, did nearly this same thing with a glass of ice water at one of the commission's hearings in 1986, and the children love knowing that they've done what a Nobel Prize winner did.

We finish by looking up the temperature in Bangor that morning on the newspaper weather page from that day, which I've kept since 1986. Maine was colder than Florida, of course. Every class is shocked that Florida can freeze.

If I Taught From Space

Christa McAuliffe was going to teach two lessons from orbit. I ask each child to plan one of their own. What would you teach the other fourth graders in America if you had fifteen minutes on television from the Space Shuttle? They write a real lesson plan, on my lesson plan form, with a goal, the materials and the steps. I have had lessons on how a goldfish swims without gravity, how to eat cereal in orbit, what Maine looks like from space, and one memorable plan for a weightless spelling bee. Then they teach their lessons to the second graders down the hall, which is its own education.

Straw Rockets

Thursday is for fun, and they have earned it. Each child rolls a tube of paper around a pencil, tapes it, folds and tapes the top shut for a nose cone, adds paper fins, slides it over a drinking straw and blows. In the gym we measure every flight with the long tape measure and graph the class results. Then they change one thing (longer tube, bigger fins, no fins) and fly again. That's an experiment, and I make sure they hear me call it one.

The Quiet Minute

On January 28, at 11:38 in the morning, we stop. I tell them the time and what happened at that time in 1986, and then the room is quiet for one minute, by the clock over the door. I have never once had to ask a fourth grader to be still during that minute. Afterward we go to lunch, and that's all.

All Week: Mission Journals and Orion

Christa McAuliffe planned to keep a journal of the whole flight, so every child keeps a mission journal for the week, in pencil, with the date at the top of every page, the way I would have kept mine. They write a little every day: what they learned, what they predicted, what surprised them.

For homework, every clear night, they go outside with a grown-up and find Orion, who stands high in the southern sky on January evenings. They draw what they see in the journal and mark down the time. By Friday the whole class can find the belt, and a few can find the Orion Nebula with their parents' binoculars.

For the Reading Corner

I put out every space book the library will lend me, from The Magic School Bus Lost in the Solar System for my reluctant readers to the old NASA picture books for the ones who want to know how everything works. I also read aloud from the newspaper clippings, a little each day.

If you use any of this, I would love to hear how it went. If you have a better experiment than the O-rings, I want that even more.

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Joanne McGrane · [email protected]
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Last updated September 6, 1999