Lesson video

Hello, everybody, it's Ms. Simkin here to teach your science lesson.

I'm really excited about today's lesson, because we are going to learn about an amazing and extraordinary scientist and astronaut.

Let's get started and jump right in to our lesson.

Our lesson question today is who is Mae Jemison.

She is the astronaut that we're going to be learning about today.

In this lesson, we're going to start with our star words like we always do, then we're going to learn Mae Jemison's story.

Then we're going to see what it's like to spend a day as an astronaut.

And then at the end of the lesson, you will have a chance to take the end of lesson quiz and see how much you have remembered.

In this lesson, you will need a piece of paper, a pencil, and, of course, your brain.

Is your brain ready to do some learning? If not, just give it a little, gentle pat, wake it up slowly.

Okay, now let's get some blood rushing to our brain.

Give it a shake.

And lastly, let's get some oxygen to our brain and take three deep breaths.

Good job.

I feel ready to begin.

Do you? Let's start with our star words.

I'm going to say them, and then you're going to say them.

NASA, gravity, space, astronaut.

Good job.

Let's talk about what those words mean.

So NASA is an organisation that's all about studying space and sending people into space.

It stands for the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, but that's quite a mouthful, so we just say NASA for short.

Space is everything beyond our Earth's universe.

So we have our Earth.

Then we have the atmosphere around the Earth, which is a layer of air.

And then everything past that atmosphere is called space.

It's there we find the planets and our sun and things like that.

An astronaut is a person who's trained to travel into space.

And the last word on that list is gravity.

That's the word that's going to be important to our lesson today.

Gravity is the pulling force that keeps us on the ground and stops us and objects from floating away.

So here's an example of gravity.

I've got this book in my hand.

What will happen when I drop it, when I let go? What do you predict? Tell your screen.

Yeah, it's going to fall to the ground.

Should we see? You were right.

That's because of gravity.

Can you pick up objects that's next to you or close to you? Maybe it's your pencil.

Hold it up.

And can you test, is it the same with all objects? What happens when you let go of your pencil? Try it for me now.

Did it fall to the ground? That is because of gravity.

Now, gravity is present on Earth.

That's why we don't float away and why my book didn't float away.

But as you'll see in this lesson, gravity is quite different when you are in space, and it's something that astronauts have to train for.

Let's start by learning about Mae Jemison's story.

This is Mae Jemison.

She was born on the 17th of October in 1956 in the United States of America.

Her mother was a teacher and her father was a carpenter, and she was the youngest of three children.

At school, Mae Jemison was really hard working and she loved all areas of science.

Even at the age of five, she knew she wanted to be a scientist.

She eventually chose to be a doctor.

And so she studied for a long time and began to work as a doctor.

But Mae Jameson didn't stay a doctor for long.

She wanted to explore other areas of science.

And as a child, she had loved reading about space and watching TV shows about space.

Mae Jemison decided to follow her dream of travelling to space, and she applied to NASA's astronaut training programme.

Do you think she got in? Yeah, she did.

She became one of only 15 people who were chosen it for more than 2000.

So NASA must have been really impressed with her.

And in September of 1992, she became the fast black woman to go into space aboard the Endeavour Space Shuttle.

What was the name of her space shuttle? Tell it to your screen.

That's right, the Endeavour Space Shuttle.

Mae Jemison spent eight days in space.

Can you show the eight on your fingers? Fingers, how many days did she spend in space? Eight.

Alongside six other astronauts.

She was the mission specialist, which meant she carried out experiments.

What was Mae Jemison famous for? Can you pause the video and tell it to your screen, please? That's right, Mae Jemison was famous for being an astronaut, but not just an astronaut, she was famous for being first African-American female astronaut.

That's so impressive.

Could you imagine being the first person in the world to do something? What an achievement.

Okay, let's see how much of that you can remember.

There are four.

Oh, I just showed you the wrong number.

I'm trying to trick you.

There are four events on the screen that happened in Mae Jemison life, but they are in the wrong order.

So I'm going to read them to you.

And then I want to see if you can put them in the correct order.

So on your piece of paper, you can write the letter for which one comes first.

Let me read them to you now.

A, apply to NASA astronaut training programme.

B, born in 1956 in the USA.

C, first black woman to go into space.

D, became a doctor.

Hmm, which one of those do you think came first? Can you write down on your piece of paper which one came first? And then put the others in order too, please.

Pause the video and do that for me now.

Good job.

Let's see if you were correct.

This is quite a tricky exercise, so don't worry if you've got something wrong.

We're going to go through the answers now.

So number one, which should be that first thing written on your piece of paper, is, B, born in 1956 in the USA.

She was born first.

That was the first thing that happened in her life.

Number two was, D, became a doctor.

Remember, that was her job before she was an astronaut.

Then number three was, A, she applied to NASA's astronaut training programme, and then after she'd done her training, number four was C, she became the first black woman to go into space.

If you need some time to mark your answers, give yourself a tick or make any corrections, then you can pause the video and do that now.

Great, now let's see what it's like to spend a day as an astronaut.

I going to show you lots of videos of real astronauts in space, and we're going to take some notes after each one.

Before we start, I need you please to draw this table on your piece of paper, so you can see there are four activities that we're going to watch our astronauts do, brushing teeth, exercise, eating, washing hair.

We're going to make some notes in bullet points on each one and we're going to draw a picture for each one.

I'm going to show you what this table should look like under the visualizer.

So with your piece of paper to draw your table, the first thing that you need to do is you need to split it into three, like this, so you're going to take your ruler, if you have one, and your pencil.

I'm going to use pen, so you can see what I'm doing a bit more clearly.

And you're going to draw two lines down your piece of paper like this.

There's one line.

And that is the second time.

And, actually, I'm just going to turn mine around like that.

Can you pause the video and draw your two lines for me now, please? Great, then we're going to write our heading, so we're going to write activity.

Then we're going to write notes, and then we're going to write a picture up here.

So we know what we're going to write in each part.

Pause the video and do that for me now, please.

Great, then we can write off four activities in here.

So our first one was brushing teeth.

Then it was exercise.

So you want to leave a gap between each, and then we had eating.

And then the last one was washing hair.

And if you want, you can draw a line under each, like this, so that you have separate boxes for each of your activities.

So you're brushing teeth notes are going to go here, and you can write in bullet points, and then your picture is going to go here.

That's what your table should look like.

Pause the video and set that up for me now.

Let's take a look at our first activity.

So the first thing that an astronaut would have to do when they wake up in the morning is going to the bathroom.

And one of the things they need to do is brushing their teeth, but there is zero gravity in space.

That means everything floats.

So it's much harder than brushing your teeth on earth.

Let's watch this astronaut have a go.

You can just watch and then make your notes afterwards.

Tiffany from Beeton, Ontario, asked, "Is it challenging to brush your teeth in space without getting toothpaste up your nose from weightlessness?" Well, let's talk about how to brush your teeth in space.

Standard toothbrush, nothing magical there, but we've got a few different things.

We don't have running water.

Can you see it floating every time he lets go of something? It floats, because there's zero gravity.

Can't have a tap.

You can't have a sink, because water would flow everywhere.

And so what do you do to wet your toothbrush and where do you spit afterwards? Those are the big questions.

So first we just fill up a water bag with water, and this is what we're going to put on our toothpaste.

So let me get a ball of water here.

There's a nice ball of water floating on the end.

Shut off the straw very carefully.

Okay, and get my toothbrush wet.

Toothbrushes soak up water nicely.

So now I have a nice wet toothbrush.

Good? So I'm partway there.

Got my toothbrush wet.

Now I just need to put some toothpaste on it and get cleaning my teeth.

So I'm going to suck the water off it, 'cause where else would it go? Nice, wet toothbrush.

Grab some toothpaste.

We just use standard toothpaste in space.

Squeeze little on, not too much, 'cause you're going to have to clean it up later.

Okay, so there's my toothpaste on my toothbrush.

It's wet.

It's ready to go.

It's loaded.

Brush my teeth, just like normal.

Get them all.

Especially the ones in the back.

You should brush your teeth for about as long as you can sing happy birthday.

That should be long enough.

Okay, so now what I'm going to do.

I've got a mouth loud of toothpaste stuff.

I got dirt.

What's the problem going to be if he spits that toothpaste out of his mouth? What's going to happen to it? Tell your screen.

Yeah, it's going to float away.

So I wonder what he's going to do.

Dirty toothbrush.

So what I do is I just swallow the toothpaste.

That makes sense.

It's edible.

Won't kill you.

Okay, so that's how an astronaut brushes his teeth or her teeth his space.

Can you make some notes in your notebooks? So an example of something you could write is what did he have to do with the water? He had to squeeze it out of a pouch.

What happened to the toothbrush when he let go of it? The toothbrush floated.

You could also draw a picture to support your notes.

Pause the video and do that for me now, please.

Fantastic.

Let's look at the next thing.

The next thing we're going to look at is how astronauts exercise when they're in space.

So floating around on a Space Station might seem like lots of fun, but it's actually not very health, because it means that our muscles aren't working in the same way that they normally would.

So astronauts have to use exercise machines and make sure that they exercise twice a day in order to keep their muscles and their bones healthy.

So let's have a look at this video.

Remember, just watch, and you can make your notes afterwards.

Okay, one thing I didn't show you, or I talked about, but I didn't show you was exercise, another piece of exercise device, which is the advanced resistive exercise, and that's what this is right here.

This is ARED.

And you could probably see this bar.

Just do a little bit of manoeuvring here.

Standby.

You have to set it up just like at any other gym.

Show you how this works.

So you can see, you can change your attitude just by going from one module to the next, going up from , down here.

Can you see that all of her hair is floating upwards? This is what we call the ARED.

And with this, you can lift weights.

based on vacuum in these cylinders, just like you do at home at a gym.

For example, if I wanted to do a squat, I could do like this.

You can put some weight on this thing.

I'm not lifting with anything, so it's too easy.

One of the cool things you can do, you can do things that you can't do at home.

For example, single leg squats with just one leg, so the other leg, it will fall over.

So all sorts of stuff.

You could also do bench press.

We have a bench that we could add on here, so you can work on your beach muscles.

So there you go, there's an example of an exercise machine.

So what I'd like you to do now is write some notes in your table.

Why is it so important for astronauts to exercise in space? And then, can you draw a picture of this exercise machine next to your notes? Pause the video and do that for me now, please.

Good job.

The next part of an astronaut's day that we're going to learn about is eating and food.

So food comes in different forms on the Space station.

Most of the time it comes in these silver pouches, where it's dehydrated.

That means the water has been taken out of that.

You still get things like ketchup up and sauces, but things like salt and pepper are made into a liquid, because if they weren't a liquid, then all of the little grains, all of the little granules of salt and pepper would float off and be hidden in all corners of the Space Station.

Let's watch a video of these astronauts eating.

Welcome back to Expedition 62 on the International Space Station.

Tonight, we thought we would show you a little bit about some of meal prep, what we do for meals onboard the Space Station.

How do we prepare our food? So the answer is we have a great variety of food up here.

Two different general types of food, thermostabilized food in these green packets that's very similar to military MREs, or meals ready to eat.

And then we also have a freeze-dried food.

So all of the water content has been sucked out.

Just basic asparagus.

So we need to add the water back in.

You want to make sure all that- So you can see they take all the water out of the food, and now they're adding it back in with this machine.

The water is mixing in, and then we usually put it here inside the food warmer.

We have refrigerated space here.

They've been nice enough to allow us to use these just for food.

All right, the dinner table.

Dinner time.

Some Turkish fish stew.

I have butternut squash.

All right, I have rice with butter, some lentil soup, and grilled chicken patty.

A lot of the Russian food comes in cans.

This is one of my favourites.

This is spicy beef with rice.

Space makes eating a lot more fun.

You can turn your spoon upside down, or you can let it go, and nothing's going to fall off.

So that's amazing.

Imagine if nothing fell off your cutlery when you held it upside down.

You can also see that liquid that the male astronaut was eating was coming up in bubbles.

You have to kind of try and eat the bubble.

Can everybody try and pretend that you're an astronaut and you're trying to catch that bubble of liquid.

I'm going to do it and then you're going to do it, ready? Squeeze it out, and then try and catch it in your mouth.

Your turn.

Good job.

It would be fun to be an astronaut.

You can eat in any direction.

I can eat upside down if I want to.

So can you now make some notes about what it's like to eat in space? And draw some pictures to go with it.

Maybe you could draw a picture of the liquid bubble coming out of the patch, or the food hanging upside down on the spoon.

Pause the video and do that for me now, please.

Great.

Okay.

The last thing we're going to look at is how astronauts wash their hair.

And that is how I wash my hair in space on the International Space Station.

Hi there, I've had a lot of people ask me how I wash my hair in space, and I thought I'd show you how I do it.

Let's see, to get started, these are the things I need, a bag of warm water, a little no rinse shampoo, a towel, and my comb.

What I'd like to do is start by just putting some hot water, squirting it onto my scalp, and I have a mirror here, so I can kind of watch what I'm doing.

What's that sound you can hear when she takes things off the wall? Do you know? It's the sound of Velcro.

You might have it on your shoes.

Why do astronauts have to Velcro everything to the wall? Yes, because if they didn't stick it to the wall with Velcro, it would just float away, and then you'd never be able to find the things that you need.

Sometimes the water gets away from you and you try and catch as much as you can.

And I just work the water up through to the ends of my hair.

And I take my no-rinse shampoo, and squirt it also on the scalp, just a little bit, and rub it in.

Again, kind of working it out to the ends.

And sometimes I'll actually take my comb to help work it all the way to the ends.

Then I like to take my towel while I have the shampoo in there and just kind of work it, because without standing under running water, we kind of need to use the towel a little bit to help get some of the dirt out.

I like to follow that by a little more water.

It's called no-rinse shampoo, but I think it's best if you use a little water with it.

It actually feels kind of squeaky clean right now.

I'll take the dry part of my towel.

We use towels for quite a while here.

Since we have limited supplies, we use them wisely.

I think that's pretty good.

And now as my hair dries, as the water evaporates from my hair, it will become humidity in the air, and then our air conditioning system will collect that into condensate, and it won't be long, and our water processing system will turn that into drinking water.

Wow.

Can you please make some notes on how this astronaut washed their hair? So where did they get their water from? What did they do with the shampoo? And then you can draw a picture to go with your notes.

If it was me, I would draw a picture of her hair, 'cause it was fantastic standing all on its ends.

Pause the video and do that for me now, please.

Great.

Good job.

What do you think sounds most exciting about being an astronaut? Pause the video and tell it to your screen.

Great, I think eating food in space looks most exciting, but maybe that's because I think eating food is my favourite thing to do on Earth, and in space, it can only be more fun.

You have worked really, really hard today.

You've done a great job, and I hope you've enjoyed learning about Mae Jemison and what it's like to be an astronaut.

If you'd like to share your work with Oak National, then you can ask your parent or your carer to share your work on Twitter by tagging @OakNational and the hashtag #LearnWithOak.

Just before you go, remember to do your end of lesson quiz, and see how much you've learned.

Remember, it doesn't matter if you get an answer wrong, every time we make a mistake, it makes our brains stronger.

Have a fantastic rest of your day.

See you soon.

Bye, everybody.