Long, long ago...

Mr. Maxwell let us use his
models. You can see the three
modules (top to bottom: Service Module,
Command Module, Lunar Module)

.... when Sister Patrice was a kid, the first humans got to go to the moon. We did a mini-project about it in our English class. We used a new magazine called ACTION and also watched a video and used Mr. Maxwell's Apollo models. 

We learned about skimming before reading. We got some vocabulary words for the Word Wall. We had to "Pause and Think" during the story to remember what we read. There was a lot of details. 

We used both silent reading and
reading aloud. Then we talked about
what we read. 

We read and talked about the catastrophe of Apollo 13. A catastrophe is a bad disaster. The astronauts almost died. But the engineers (on Earth) and the astronauts (in the Command Module or the Lunar Module) worked as a team. They had to solve a lot of problems together. Then they had to hope that their work was successful.

The Service Module had an explosion. There was not enough power. And, they were running out of oxygen. People watched on TV and everyone was worried.

The Command Module had a heat shield on one end. It gets 5000 degrees hot on the bottom. When they came to earth, they could not talk on the radio for a while so no one knew if they were alive. They were. 

They landed safely. They did a splash down into the ocean. They did not know if the parachutes would open. They did not know if the heat shield would work. But they did. So it was successful.

The Apollo 13 mission was a failure because so much went wrong. It was a success, too. Because they solved the problems by working together as a team.

A picture from an old newspaper. The Command
Module is very small for three people.

They also made a movie called Apollo 13 in case you want to see the pictures in color.