Solar System Unit, Version II

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After the coronavirus shutdowns began this spring, and everything was closed, I had to think of a unit we could do without the benefit of the library! I rely heavily on our inter-library loan system for books, so it was hard to do without it. But as I looked through the books in our personal library, I realized that a unit on our Solar System would be perfect. We already owned many books we could use, and we'd done this unit before so I had lots of ideas for activities. I was surprised, as always, though, at how long it had been since we last studied the Solar System—seven years ago in 2013! Marigold hadn't even been born yet (I think I was expecting her at the time!).

One of my favorite things about teaching the children at home is watching them get excited about the subjects we're studying. Malachi has always been the one who loves Space (and really, how can anyone NOT love Space?) but during this unit, Teddy's interest really caught fire and he started poring over our Solar System books and playing Astronaut and Mars Rover all the time, just like Malachi used to. It was so fun to see!

To go along with this unit, we used a great series of videos from YouTube called "Crash Course Astronomy." (They have some specially "for kids" as well—but we liked the regular ones better.) They cover tons of information, but most of it is explained quite simply, and it's split into a bunch of different videos so you can take them one step at at time. I had organized this unit with basically a day on each planet, plus separate days for the sun, the moon, comets, asteroids, and so forth—so these videos correlated perfectly. We started with this one—Crash Course: Mercury—and went from there. You can see a whole list of videos here, or just search for the specific planet you want on YouTube.

Our second favorite group of videos were these called "Solar System 101" by National Geographic. That link takes you to a playlist with all the planets, plus some extras like meteor showers and exoplanets.

We tried out a few other video series, but most of them were annoying and/or had music that was too loud. You'd be surprised (or maybe you wouldn't) at how many "Kids' Videos" have that problem.

I will also highlight one of our favorite solar system books (and we have read many, many solar system books)—it's a newer one and the photos are spectacular. You can find Teddy looking at this book almost every day around here! It's called "The Planets: The Definitive Visual Guide to Our Solar System."

We tried watching some of these NOVA shows about the planets, and the imagery is really beautiful, but the narration and pacing annoyed us, so we didn't end up watching them all.

One of the first activities we did was make these rotation/revolution models (instructions here) to show the difference between those two terms. I thought it was fun to look back at the previous crop of students who made these last time I taught this unit! Little Sebby and little Abey!

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! :)

Space Robots and Rovers

Some of the most interesting robots we learned about were the Mars Rovers and other space robots. We watched this video from the library and found it fascinating.

We liked this book, too.

This page lets you experiment with controlling a robot vehicle remotely. When you try to control one on the moon, there's a delay, and it makes it really tricky!

A video about the Mars rovers.

Here are some awesome pictures taken by the Curiosity rover.

The way Curiosity was landed is amazing!

And we couldn't believe that Curiosity has even found evidence of brine on Mars!

The children made their own rovers out of Lego. They were quite complicated! :)

Junie made one too. :)

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.

ATK Rocket Display

As we were driving toward Promontory Summit, we saw several signs with pictures of rockets and "ATK" on them. We wondered if we were near some sort of explosives or rocket factory, but we'd never heard of ATK and didn't see anything that looked recognizable. We thought no more of it until we were driving back from the Golden Spike historic site, and Sebby said, "Look at that long white rocket!" I was not inclined to believe there would be such a thing, out in the middle of the desert, but after we went around a few more bends in the road, there it was! Something long, white, and pointy. We decided we had to go investigate.

It wasn't difficult to find, as there were road signs that said "Rocket Display--2 miles." We just followed them and soon arrived at a large, office-building-y facility, with a bunch of rockets strewn around in front. We parked in visitor parking and went to look around. The rockets and motor casings all have signs in front of them, and helpful diagrams showing you which components they are. It was awesome! 

It was so windy and there were tumbleweeds everywhere! We passed a million of them on the road.

Later I mentioned this place to a couple people, who both said, "Oh, Thiokol?" in a knowledgable way. Which I'd never heard of either, but I guess that's its parent company, or what it used to be called, or something. ATK stands for Alliant Techsystems, apparently, and they have several facilities in Utah. What we had run into was the ATK Propulsion Systems facility. It's nice of them to put out their rockets for people to look at, way out there in the middle of nowhere! The other thing you should do while in the area, I've heard, is look at the Spiral Jetty (if it's not underwater, that is). But we didn't do it, regrettably.

Patriot Missile

Motor casing

And our very favorite (Malachi was ecstatic to see this in person!)---the reusable solid rocket motor. (This picture shows the exit cone.) This is one of the motors that goes on the outside of the space shuttle, like this:

It was so enormous! We loved it. And it was the perfect place to eat our lunch. :)

Moon Phase Cookies and "Moon Tennis"

We loved doing this! Even Malachi was pretty good at creating each phase of the moon on his cookie with frosting. We took great strides of improvement beyond the original idea by using cookies that are actually GOOD, though: my friend Beth's homemade oreos. We love these! I made everyone tell me which cookie showed which phase, and then they sandwiched each cookie together with its "match" (first quarter with last quarter, waxing gibbous with waning crescent, etc.) before eating them. Yum!

Here's the recipe:

Homemade Oreos

2 packages Devils Food cake mix
4 large eggs
1 1/2 c shortening

Mix all ingredients together. Roll into tiny balls, place on cookie sheet, and bake at 375 for 7-8 minutes. Make sandwich cookies by spreading one cookie with frosting (recipe below), then placing another cookie on top.

Frosting/filling:
1/8 c butter or margarine, softened
1 8-oz. package cream cheese, softened
1 1/2 t vanilla
2 c powdered sugar

Mix all ingredients until smooth.

Saw this idea of "moon tennis" online. It went along with our discussion of what gravity would actually feel like on the moon---the idea being that some things would be easier to do and others would be harder, and that our lack of familiarity with that amount of gravity would make everything just feel . . . weird. Everyone really loved this game but it was WILD. Luckily all the materials are lightweight because there was lots of accidental (we hope) bashing of heads and arms.

Sam and I and the older boys watched this documentary about the Apollo Moon Missions. It was SO interesting. It's composed mainly of interviews with the different astronauts, and it's just fascinating to hear them recount their impressions and experiences. Lots of small, interesting details that you would never really think to wonder about---like if Michael Collins (the astronaut who stayed in orbit while the other two walked on the moon) felt lonely while he waited for the others. ("I would have liked being lonelier! Mission Control was yapping in my ear the whole time!") We loved it.

Astronaut food and playground activities

There were some activities that needed to be done outside, so one day we went to a playground nearby (the only one I know of with a merry-go-round) to talk more about gravity and space travel. Here, the children are rolling a ball to each other as the merry-go-round spins, and observing its path.

Here, we are eating and drinking upside-down (kind of like this)

Here we seeing the difficulties of launching rockets into orbit, trying to reach the moon even as we are rotating ourselves (and of course, the moon is not a stationary target either).

I still remember how amazed I was the first time I tasted "astronaut ice cream." It is so weird and cool. I ordered these foods and we tried them out for our picnic after the day's activities. The children loved that!