Sun and Eclipse Unit Study

Before we went on our short trip to Idaho to see the solar eclipse (which was AMAZING—you can read about it here on my other blog), I decided to squeeze in a short unit on the sun and eclipses. A lot of this was review for the older kids, but it was new to the younger ones, and we all had fun with the models. I had some good ideas that I never got to use (eclipse cookies, for one) but there just wasn't enough time! Maybe for the eclipse in 2024 we'll use them. Or in 2045! Will I still be homeschooling in 2045! Ha! It feels like it. But since Ezekiel would be…let's see…28? by then—let's hope I'm taking a well-deserved rest.

This yardstick model was fun and easy to make. You can find the instructions here. You make a clay ball for the earth, and another ball, 1/4 of its size, for the moon. You clip them on the yardstick 30 inches apart. Then you use sunlight (or electric light) to make the moon cast a shadow on the sun. I really liked this because it showed how small the "dot" of totality is at any one time.

Here's another cool model, for which I got the idea here. This is an illustration of why the moon phases appear the way they do on earth, which is something that seems simple, and I've thought I understood long ago—but when I actually tried to think it through, I couldn't explain it satisfactorily. This model makes it perfectly clear that it is our perspective, looking "out" from earth, that causes the different phases.

As you can see by looking at the black foam board, from above, the moon always faces its same side toward the sun. The same side is always lit (represented by the white sides of the ping-pong balls). But when you stick your head in the hole and look outward, you see the perspectives I pasted around the black foam board (on the photos with words). I just stuck my head in and took pictures as I turned around so you could see: crescent, half, gibbous, full, and new moon. It's also pretty clear from this model why a solar eclipse can only happen at New Moon, and a lunar eclipse happens at Full Moon. 

If you want to reinforce the solar/lunar eclipse difference, you might like these worksheets we used for diagramming them. (Scroll down a bit to this picture:)

Sebastian also used this foam board model to show how the solar eclipse worked. He just moved the camera around to make the moon block out the sun in successive stages. The eclipse we saw had the moon moving from right to left across the sun, as Sebastian showed above (compare with this picture below):

Only it was really more of a diagonal, starting in the right upper quadrant of the sun and moving downward. [Time proceeds, in this picture, from left to right.]

We had a surprising amount of fun (considering that we aren't, ahem, all preschoolers) doing this fiery sun painting project. Instructions are here, and it's really easy: just cut out a white circle and squeeze blobs of warm-colored paint on it. Then wrap the whole circle with plastic wrap (covering the blobs of paint). Squish it around with your hands and fingers to make fiery suns! Then paste the suns onto dark paper and add flares and prominences if you want.

I think Teddy's sun (above) was my favorite.

We made our moon phase cookies again, using homemade "Oreos." These cookies are way better than real Oreos, in my opinion. The recipe is at the link above.

We had done these before during our Solar System Unit.

Another good thing we did during our mini-unit was make these eclipse T-shirts! (This picture was taken at Bear World in Rexburg, where we watched the eclipse.) I think they're so cute, and they were so easy! I cut out contact-paper circles (smaller for the smaller shirts and bigger for the bigger—I used bowls or plates to trace around) and stuck them onto the fronts of the black T-shirts. Then, using glow-in-the-dark fabric paint, the kids painted lines and rays out from the contact-paper circles. You can use the paint squeeze-bottle itself, or help it along with a thin brush. We did both.

The clear glow-in-the-dark paint was quite pale, so we made it pretty thick so it would show up even when NOT glowing. And I like the whitish color of it. But Abe used yellow on his, and that looked good too, and a couple of the kids just put in yellow accents with their white paint. (The girls would have used pink and orange paint if I'd let them—that probably would have been cute too, but I wanted them to look accurate!:)) You really can't mess these up! After the paint dried, we just peeled off the contact paper, and were left with a nice neat circle of "moon," with the beautiful glowing corona of the sun radiating out around it. 

We wore these (of course) on eclipse day and other times on our trip, and lots of people noticed the kids' shirts and complimented them. And the shirts, my children tell me, really did glow during totality! 

Here's a better look at the shirt

Teddy's had yellow and white on it

This is a picture Seb drew of the eclipse after we got home.

I read that we would be able to see planets during the eclipse, and we did! You can see one of them (Jupiter?) in the picture above. It was so cool!

Well, I must admit that the BEST part of this unit was seeing totality, and nothing else can compare! But I think it would be a pretty fun unit even if you were just going to view a partial eclipse. Here is my Pinterest Board for this unit:

Sun and Eclipse Homeschool Unit

Maybe I'll be updating it in 7 years! :)

Telescopes

We got a telescope through a charter school program last year, but we still had it in the box, so during this unit after we talked about lenses seemed like the perfect time to finally get it out and put it together. It's this telescope, and we haven't used it much for stars yet, but we did have fun learning how it worked and experimenting with looking at signs and trees and things.

Poor Daisy got tired of waiting for her turn. Seems like she always has to wait for the older children!

(Our cousin Michael was visiting, too)

The innovations that have been made in telescopes and lenses in the last several years are just amazing. We read lots of books about some of the new space telescopes, and we always love looking at pictures from the Hubble Space Telescope!

We learned about liquid mirror telescopes made of mercury, which I had never heard of. Apparently these liquid mirrors are a lot cheaper to make than the huge, flawless mirrors they need to grind for other telescopes (and which can take years to get smooth enough). But the liquid mirrors have a few problems too (e.g. they can't be tilted).

This video of a spinning parabolic mercury mirror demonstrates how it works on a small scale.

Playing Astronaut

Re-entry parachute check

One of my favorite things to watch is the way the children play whatever we are currently learning about. Of course, these Solar System weeks were FULL of astronaut and space play. I love this astronaut kit Abraham made for Malachi. Note the "launch hole" (!!) he climbs inside of to launch from (this is to protect bystanders from being burned by his rocket boosters firing!)

Ready for launch (wearing jetpack)

Take-off!

Seb dressed in his astronaut gear

Junie doesn't want to be left out

Daisy with rocket and launch tower she built from blocks

Astronauts, Space Travel, and the International Space Station

We found a lot of ideas for demonstrations of how astronauts might feel in zero gravity. Malachi, who wants to be an astronaut, was especially interested in these simple demonstrations. Most of them came from the book Cosmic Science, but this site had some additional ideas and pictures.

One thing we tried was putting on rubber gloves and then trying to do a couple simple tasks underwater. We had to pick up a penny and put it in a cup, then take it out again; and then screw a nut onto a bolt. It was quite difficult! I can't imagine how much practice it would have taken for the astronauts to become competent enough, while wearing their gloves and while in zero gravity, to perform delicate tasks like fixing the Hubble Telescope!

Here we observed and recorded the difference between a vehicle's re-entry into the atmosphere with a parachute, and without one. (We made a parachute for a toy out of plastic wrap and yarn.)

We saw how constant motion can "trick" the inner ear into thinking you aren't moving when you are, or how a change in motion can make you think you're moving the opposite direction.

We tried writing with a ballpoint pen upside down (and compared this with using Sam's "space pen"---and a pencil).

Robot arm operator

Junie looks on with interest

Success! Malachi grabs the clay ball!

Perhaps the most fun of these activities was making a robot arm, like the one found on the International Space Station. It was surprisingly tricky to maneuver it correctly in order to pick up a small clay ball (and we even had the resistance of the table to press against, which you wouldn't in space, of course).

There are lots of cool videos you can watch that show how things behave in zero gravity. One of our favorites was this one, showing what happens when you wring out a washcloth in space.

The children really liked this one, too: everyday life on the space station.

Lastly, this is the most interesting movie ever---an hour-long tour of the International Space Station. We could have watched this all day. Just watching the narrator move around is fascinating, but seeing the different spaces they live and work in is even better. I would want to spend all my time up in the cupola, watching earth. So cool!

Radar Mapping (Venus)

When we were studying Venus we learned about how some space probes used Radar Mapping to determine topography on Venus (since they couldn't see through the thick clouds). This seemed like kind of an abstract concept, so we talked about topographical maps and then I had the boys try some "Radar Mapping" of their own.

I just put some bowls into a shoebox and covered the box with paper so they couldn't see inside. Then we took a long skewer and marked centimeter markings on the side. The boys poked the skewer through the paper, observed how far it went in, and recorded their measurements on top of the paper. You have to remember to write down the number corresponding to the height of the object beneath, NOT how far the skewer goes in. In other words, I gave them a maximum height from ground to "cloud" (I think it was 11 cm), and then if the skewer went in 4 cm, we wrote down "7 cm" (11 minus 4) as the height of our mystery object. They caught on to that pretty quickly.

They had to make lots of measurements to make sure they were getting a good picture of what was underneath!

Once we had the paper full of measurements, I had them color it in with markers, using warm colors for the highest points and cools for the lowest points. Then I asked them to describe what they thought was beneath before we looked inside. They said "two mountains---one taller than the other."

Which was exactly right!

This was fun. They wanted to do it again, so they did it themselves for awhile during free time later that day.

Scale Models of the Solar System (size and distance)

The sun (by Abe,) Mercury, Venus, Earth and Mars

One of the first activities we did was pace out the distances, to scale, between the various planets in the Solar System. I always think activities like this are so memorable (we did something similar when learning about the amount of empty space in an atom) and fun. It's just incredible to imagine the vast distances we are talking about even in just our own solar system! Mind-boggling.

There are a few different ways to do this---this one uses beads and strings, so you could do it inside. This one is similar ("solar system in your pocket")

This one is really great, because it shows distance AND planet size to scale, so we would have done this if I'd been more prepared. Also I really love the writing style of the guy who wrote this up (clearly a passionate astronomer)

But we ended up doing this very simple walk, using the following numbers of steps:

To Get From: 

Sun to Mercury walk 3 steps 

Mercury to Venus 2.5 steps 

Venus to Earth 2 steps

Earth to Mars 4 steps 

Mars to Jupiter 27.5 steps

Jupiter to Saturn 32.5 steps

Saturn to Uranus 72 steps

Uranus to Neptune 81.5 steps

Neptune to Kuiper Belt/Pluto 71 steps

It was really easy and it fit (barely) in the space we were trying to use. I just made really simple signs on skewers to poke in representing each planet, so we could look back and see how far we'd come.

Pluto. The inner planets are waaaay back by the purple arrow---almost out of sight

Enlarged

Next we wanted to show the relative sizes of the planets. For this model, of course, we didn't show relative distances, and we couldn't include the sun either.

We used the following dimensions:

Mercury: 1½"

Venus: 3¾"

Earth: 3 7/8"

Mars: 2"

Jupiter: 44¼" (Tape butcher paper together to get desired width)

Saturn: 37 1/8"

Uranus: 16"

Neptune: 15¼"

Pluto: ¾"

We used a compass---or a string tied to a pencil (cut to the radius of the planet we were drawing) for the  larger planets---to make the planets the right size. Just learning how to do this was educational in itself, I thought. The older boys were quite pleased with themselves.

Sam even showed them how to do an ellipse, using a loop instead of a line of string. That was for Saturn's rings.

We colored the planets after we drew them, which took forever, but looked nice. Our butcher paper kept curling because it was nearly at the end of the roll. Annoying (the planets kept curling off the wall even after we put them up). We should have flattened them under something first.

We put them up in our stairway and it was really fun to walk by them every day (when they weren't falling down). I love the dramatic size of Jupiter and Saturn next to the tiny little rocky planets!

And there's always this cool "powers of 10"-type universe scale site (did you watch "Powers of 10" in high school science class? I love that movie)