Last night, long after everyone else had gone home, had their tea and relaxed on their sofas, Year 5 returned to school to partake in a fabulous evening full of chocolate digestives, telescopes, constellations, blankets, hot chocolate, marshmallows and the firepit.

“What on earth did they get up to?” I hear you cry! Well, we had a Space themed evening of Stargazing, or….really, an evening of fogwatching. It was unfortunate the weather was not on our side again, but in true Southill style, we remained resilient, resourceful and still had a brilliant evening with our friends.

We began by recapping the phases of the moon using chocolate digestives, yes, that’s right, biscuits.  Ask us to teach you the phases of the moon using biscuits, just be careful once you get to waning gibbous, there’s not a lot of biscuit left by that point!

Next we were joined by an astro-photographer and telescope expert to talk us through some of his astro-photos of nebulas and galaxies. We finished by looking at the nebula in the Orion constellation. This in turn led to our learning of what a constellation is and looking at a sky map to see which constellations are currently visible above Dorset at this time of year. We learned about Orion, Ursa Major, Cassiopeia and how we can use the position of these constellations to find the North Star, Polaris.

We quickly headed outside and luckily it was dry and not windy so we wrapped up warm, lay on our blankets and used our StarWalk app on the iPads to look and see which stars were currently hiding behind the clouds in the night sky above Southill School! We were amazed to see the constellations we had just learned about and find Polaris on our iPads. We even saw the moon and Jupiter, Neptune and Uranus which are all currently aligned in the Solar System! Even though it was foggy, we still had a chance to look through a telescope and see how they are set up to get the best view of the night sky.

To balance our evening of stargazing, we also had the wonderful treat of enjoying sitting round our very own Southill firepit! We sat on the comfy logs around the fire, toasted marshmallows and drank hot chocolate while warming up and discussing what we had seen.

This truly was a wonderful evening to share with you all and we are so proud of you all for enjoying yourselves and having the best time even though it was rather cloudy!