GALWAY — Students at Joseph Henry Elementary School in Galway got a chance on Monday to glimpse soil samples from the moon.

Retired Poland Central School teacher Nancy Wheeler is certified by NASA to present a space lesson, and part of the presentation is a plastic case with several examples of moon dust and dirt.

Elementary Principal Norm Griffin said the samples gave him a few days of worry last week.

“I had to sign all kinds of promissory notes to have the samples shipped to the school and they were supposed to arrive in three to four days,” he said. “NASA kept asking if they had arrived and they hadn’t.”

He said the samples were sent through the mail and took 11 days to reach the school. They were immediately placed in a vault.

Wheeler has two grandchildren in the district and they asked her to bring her lessons with the moon samples to Galway.

Griffin said originally Wheeler was to give the presentation two or three times, but when word got out, many teachers asked if their students could be included.

“We’ve ended up with 12 presentations over two days,” he said.

Wheeler is a former science teacher and spent many years before her retirement in 2003 teaching fourth and fifth grades.

She gave students in Dorothy Chynoweth’s fifth grade a quick review of air and space travel Monday afternoon, starting with the Wright Brothers’ flight in 1903.

Griffin said he felt the program fit well with the “hands-on” science curriculum in the elementary school.

“We teach from a lot of kits that give the kids a chance to do more than read about science,” he said.

Wheeler gave students visual models such as the end of a string carried away from a globe in the library to represent the distance from the Earth to the moon.

The student holding the end of the string ended up in the hallway, showing students a representation of nearly 2 million miles.

She also had a drawing of a thermometer showing the extreme temperatures on the moon ranging from about minus 300 degrees Fahrenheit in the shade to an average of 214 degrees in the sun.

“The last trip our astronauts made to the moon was Apollo 17 in 1972,” she said. “That was before some of your parents were born.”

In contrast to what a memorable event for Americans the first trip to the moon was in 1969, none of the students in the library Monday said they were aware the space shuttle Discovery has been orbiting the Earth on a two-week mission that will end Saturday.