Is it a bird? Is it a plane? If you have to ask, then – technically – it is an unidentified flying object (UFO), although not necessarily an alien craft. Saturday 2 July is World UFO day, when residents of Earth are encouraged to look skyward in search of unexpected items whizzing around. The date was chosen in honour of the first ever reported UFO sighting: US pilot Kenneth Arnold claimed to have seen nine objects flying in tandem on 24 June 1947 in Mount Rainier national park.
This year’s World UFO day was also chosen to mark the anniversary of the supposed UFO crash in Roswell – and is commemorated as a means of encouraging the US government to declassify its files on UFOs. It’s an intriguing subject, and one that works across the curriculum. So how can you explore it with your students?
Primary
A good place to start is with the words pupils will need to use when talking about space and interplanetary exploration. This clear, colourful word mat uses images and text to help pupils spell key terms such as telescope, scientist and astronaut.
And to get your class thinking about other worlds, try creating an informative wall with these colourful display posters from Teaching Ideas. Each one includes an image of the planet in question with key information, such as surface temperature, diameter and the length of a single day.
Claire Freeman and Ben Cort’s popular book, Aliens Love Underpants, is another great entry point for the topic. You can start by reading the witty tales and follow up with these matching cards from Twinkl, which use images from the text – including a UFO in flight and some aliens jumping around in underpants – to build visual recognition skills. And you can ask your pupils to create their own UFO-inspired creations – stories, poems or even designs for their own spacecrafts – and present them on this alien-bordered paper.
For a more surreal approach to the topic, how about the idea of a fish in a UFO? That’s one of the images conjured by Kenn Nesbitt in his poem, A Fish In a Spaceship. His funny creation is explored in detail in this literacy resource from PrimaryLeap. It covers a wide range of tasks: asking pupils to read the poem and answer questions demonstrating comprehension; an unscrambling words task; and an activity getting them to think about what animal images they would create for a poem.
Secondary
Secondary students can also be encouraged to think about UFOs in a poetic way. Southbound on the Freeway by May Swenson looks at Earth from the perspective of a newly arrived alien who is trying to work out the situation with life on the planet. This differentiated series of activities from TeachIt asks students to create a radio broadcast exploring the events of the poem from the perspective of a presenter and an eyewitness.
For a real-life look at the possibility of encountering alien life, try this collection of articles from The Day. Topics covered include: the ExoMars mission, which launched in March 2016 with the hope of finding life on the red planet; the warning from Stephen Hawking that we should colonise space to guard against the destruction of human life; and the discovery of the most Earth-like planet in our solar system.
You could also look at how scientists go about finding new planets. The Doppler effect is one method, as this key stage 4 resource from Royal Observatory Greenwich explains. It takes this educational video as its basis, and gets students to create their own demonstration of how the effect can be applied to finding planets orbiting distant stars.
The Royal Observatory Greenwich has also created space-themed material for key stage 3 students, with this resource on journey times to other planets. It’s also based on a video and an animation, Are There Aliens?, which looks at how life on Earth came to be and how likely it is that we could find other life forms nearby. The related task looks at the distance to other planets and introduces students to the formula for calculating how long each journey would take.
And finally, you can get your class excited about the many wonders of our world, with this series of lessons from IntoFilm. It links to the awe-inspiring documentary A Beautiful Planet, and gets students to think about practical issues such as water usage and waste, as well as the impact of different kinds of behaviour on the planet.
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