Students become familiar with lunar phases by locating and then graphing the Moon phase of their own birthdays. After listening and discussing lunar myths and legends they create their own Birthday Moon Stories.
Students will learn about digital images and how satellites orbiting Earth send information and pictures to Earth over the Internet.
Students in the middle level solar system activity will study the effects of gravity on the planets of the Solar System. They will view movies from the lunar Apollo missions, calculate their own weight on other planets, and propose what they might weigh on newly discovered planets around other stars.
In this activity, learners use the concepts of greater than, less than, and equal to, in order to classify student height, object size, and planet size. They will build scale models of the planets based on their discoveries of planet size. In the extension, advanced learners download images of the planets and use NIH Image to identify and describe their size by comparing them to one another.
A whole-body activity that explores the relative sizes, distances, orbit, and spin of the Sun, Earth and Moon.
By using these activities, K-4 students will have the concrete experiences of observing, organizing, comparing, and describing the movement of objects that they observe in the sky. Students will also learn how early cultures viewed objects in the sky and created stories to explain the objects they observed. Then, students will create their own stories to explain their own observations.
