Farewell #peakeoftheweek!

On 15th December 2015, many of our children (and our staff!) watched the first British astronaut to travel to the International Space Station blast off into space. Since then we have been following Tim Peake’s adventures, awed by his photographs, fascinated by his experiments, and, most importantly, inspired to learn more about space and science ourselves.

And so #peakeoftheweek was born!

A twitter campaign celebrating all things scientific, we’ve spent every single Wednesday for the last four months doing and learning so much, engaging children as young as four months and as old as thirteen in a wide variety of activities. Our children have made space aliens out of sparkly Play-Doh, launched rockets into the sky and made fizz inflators using bicarbonate of soda and vinegar, made an enormous giant rocket to play in, gone on their own spacewalks dressed as astronauts and aliens: they even became space biologists, planting rocket seeds that had been all the way to the International Space Station!

On 18th June 2016, Tim returned to Earth after spending six months in space, bringing an end to #peakeoftheweek. But we went out with a bang! Our children spent the day drawing space pictures for Tim Peake, exploring a heuristic space themed environment, making aliens out of Play-Doh and green space slime, and going to the moon in our small world area. Our very own Tim Peake spent the day exploring with Forest Frogs, exploring the allotment, hanging out in the treehouse and eating tea with the children!

We’ll miss #peakeoftheweek but will keep doing plenty of experiments and taking part in lots of science themed activities in the future!

We’d love to take this opportunity to thank Tim Peake for inspiring so many young minds here at our centre (as well as for the occasional like, comment and retweet that made us all so happy!). It goes without saying that you’re very welcome to visit us at Bright Beginnings any time – after you recover of course!

A huge thank you also to RHS for Schools, the UK Space Agency and the European Space Agency for their efforts to engage children of all ages; you’re never too young to learn about science – #peakeoftheweek has made that very clear!