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A classroom-ready space & sky library.

Skypedia is built to be useful in a real classroom on a real Monday. This page is the teacher’s guide: a quick-start, age-band suggestions, NGSS alignment notes, and a handful of lesson plans you can print or adapt.

Teacher quick-start

  1. Step 1

    Open it on the classroom screen

    No login. The home page works as a daily warm-up.

  2. Step 2

    Pick one section per week

    Most teachers cycle: This Week → History → Space Weather → Missions & Objects.

  3. Step 3

    Print a lesson plan

    Use Ctrl/Cmd-P on any lesson below for a clean printable.

  4. Step 4

    Send the link home

    Families can use the same pages — no accounts on either end.

  5. Step 5

    Tell us what worked

    Email missioncontrol@skypedia.net with feedback or requests.

Where to start by age

Grades 3–5

Ages 8–10

Use the "What is it? / Why it matters / Did you know?" cards on Space Weather as read-alouds. Pair Missions & Objects with simple research worksheets.

Start with

Grades 6–8

Ages 11–13

Anchor a weekly current-events routine on This Week in Space. Use Deep Space as a jumping-off point for student-led research projects.

Start with

Grades 9–12

Ages 14+

Older students can interpret raw NOAA Kp index data, run the Space Weather Lab, and practice source evaluation with the UAP Files page.

Start with

NGSS alignment notes

Skypedia is a content library, not a curriculum, so think of these as starting points rather than complete units. Cross-referenced with the Next Generation Science Standards and common ELA literacy-in-science standards.

StandardTopicUse these pages
3-ESS2-1 / 5-ESS1-2Patterns in Earth and sky
MS-ESS1-1 / MS-ESS1-2Sun, Earth, Moon system
MS-ESS1-3Scale properties of objects in the solar system
HS-ESS1-1The Sun's energy and solar activity
HS-ETS1-1 (Engineering)Defining and analyzing real-world problems

Printable lesson plans

Each lesson is intentionally short — one period, one objective. Cmd/Ctrl-P prints a clean copy. Adapt freely.

Reading the Kp index

Ages 11–1445 min

Objective. Students read a real NOAA dataset, classify each day as quiet or stormy, and explain why the Kp scale is logarithmic-ish (each step is a bigger jump than the last).

Materials

  • Projector or shared screen
  • Printed worksheet (use the table below)
  • Coloured pencils — green, yellow, orange, red

Standards touched

  • MS-ESS1-1
  • NGSS Patterns crosscutting concept

Lesson flow

  1. Open /space-weather and walk through the Geomagnetic Storms card together.
  2. Open /this-week and find the Kp values for the last 7 days.
  3. Have students fill in the table and colour-code each day (green ≤ 3, yellow 4, orange 5–6, red 7+).
  4. Discussion: did anyone notice the news that day? What might astronauts have done differently?

Build a 70-year mission timeline

Ages 9–1260 min

Objective. Students place 10 chosen missions on a wall timeline from Sputnik (1957) to today and explain one cause-and-effect link between two of them.

Materials

  • A long strip of paper or whiteboard space
  • Sticky notes
  • Access to /history and /explorer

Standards touched

  • MS-ESS1-3
  • HS-ETS1-1
  • CCSS literacy in science

Lesson flow

  1. As a class, pick 10 missions from /history (a mix of crewed, robotic, and telescope missions works well).
  2. Each student or pair drafts a sticky note: year, mission, one sentence on what it did.
  3. Place them on the wall in chronological order.
  4. Each student picks two missions and writes a "because of X, Y was possible" sentence underneath.

Source-evaluation drill: official UAP records

Ages 13+45 min

Objective. Students compare a news headline about a UAP/UFO claim with the official record on AARO.mil or archives.gov and write a one-paragraph evaluation.

Materials

  • A recent news article (teacher-chosen)
  • Access to /uap-files

Standards touched

  • CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.RST.9-10.8
  • NGSS Engaging in argument from evidence

Lesson flow

  1. Read the news article together. Identify the specific claim being made.
  2. On /uap-files, follow the link to the AARO or NARA source named in the page.
  3. Each student answers: who is the primary source, what data exists, what is missing?
  4. Write a paragraph: does the headline match what the official record actually says?

Why it works in classrooms

No sign-ups, ever

Students never make an account. Teachers never collect a roster. Just open a tab.

No ads, no trackers

No third-party analytics, no advertising network, no student data leaves the device.

Real public-data sources

Everything traces back to NASA, NOAA, JPL, NARA, or AARO. The data sources page shows the chain.

Refreshes itself

NOAA space-weather alerts and NASA close-approach data update daily via GitHub Actions.

Plain, age-banded language

Topics are scaffolded with "What is it? / Why it matters / Did you know?" so a third-grader and a ninth-grader can use the same page.

Works on any device

Mobile, Chromebook, library desktop. High-contrast colours and keyboard nav by default.

Where the data comes from

  • NOAA Space Weather Prediction Center — alerts, Kp index, geomagnetic forecasts (swpc.noaa.gov)
  • NASA JPL CNEOS — close approaches of near-Earth objects (cneos.jpl.nasa.gov)
  • NASA Open APIs — public imagery and reference data (api.nasa.gov)
  • NASA Exoplanet Archive — confirmed exoplanet catalog
  • AARO & National Archives — official UAP reporting and records used on the UAP Files page

Data refreshes run daily and weekly via GitHub Actions. Every page that shows live data includes a “data updated” timestamp.

▸ If you are a teacher, please read this

The NGSS alignment above has not been reviewed by a teacher.

Skypedia is written by a security engineer, not a K–12 educator. The standards mapping in the table above is our best interpretation of the public NGSS documents plus the content we’ve built — but nobody with an actual teaching credential has walked through it and told us what’s wrong.

If you use these lessons and any of the standards listed don’t match what you’d expect, or you’d add or remove a page from the “use these pages” column, please tell us. Specific corrections beat generic feedback every time.

Send NGSS feedbackOpen a GitHub issue

Found a typo? Have an idea?

Skypedia is a small, independent project. Teacher feedback is the fastest way it improves.

Email mission control