Astronomy ... Completed!

Well we finished Astronomy on time ... YEAH! It was a bit rushed we ended up doing a few sessions the last week of term 2 to make sure we did though, as I didn't want to have to complete the last few chapters during term 3.

These are some pictures from the girls Astronomy workbooks ... 



The Sun



Mercury




Venus



Earth



The Moon



Mars



Asteroids and Meteorites



Jupiter

Saturn

Uranus and Neptune

Pluto



Stars



Zodiac Constellations

Space Stations and becoming an Astronaut

My Perfect Planet descriptions

Oreo Moon Project



Studying Jupiter

There is a Great Red Spot on Jupiter which is basically like a massive hurricane on earth. We made a "hurricane in a bottle" as an example of what a hurricane on Jupiter might look like.

We got 2 plastic soda bottles and a plastic bottle joiner. If you don't have a plastic bottle joiner lying around like I did, place a washer between the two bottles and then use duct or electrical tape to seal the bottles together.

They absolutely love doing experiments but always look so serious when doing them.
Cracks me up!

The Fashionista filled one bottle with 500mls of water and then Agent Smelly connected the bottles with the connector.

Just like an egg timer you flip the bottles over BUT you must move them in a circular motion, to get the water swirling in order to form the hurricane-shaped funnel.

The little madams played with this for ages. They added some glitter and watched the glitter move through it but that wasn't enough so The Fashionista suggested adding food dye, so it ended up blue! That looked kind of cool actually. Then they added another 500mls to see if it went better with more water. I was a little surprised by how something so simple kept them amused for so long.

Said giant timer currently is residing in their bathroom and they give it a flip each time they go in there.

We were supposed to do this experiment ages ago but I had to go buy cheap soda especially so we had some bottles to use. Then someone who shall remain nameless, but puts the rubbish out, put them out with the recycling bin so I had to go through it all over again. It ended up taking us about 3 weeks to simply get 2 bottles to use!
 

Astronomy - Week 1

This year the girls and I planned that they would do more science. It's a subject they love and you can incorporate so many more subjects into science when you do it.

So one of the science subjects they will be doing this year is Astronomy and we'll be using one of the Apologia books, Exploring Creation with Astronomy, by Jeannie Fulbright.

I purchased them each a black jotter / journal book for them to put all their Astronomy work in. I am hoping to obtain some other things for them to add into their books along with the things that come with the lap book package that I also bought from CurrClick. They spent til five o'clock decorating the very front cover and the first inside page, even though I told them at three they could pack everything away. Apparently they were having too much fun decorating their books. Nerds!

In the first chapter they covered what astronomy is, some famous Astronomers and basically worked on a mnemonic for remembering the order of the planets. The mnemonic really challenged Agent Smelly and she got quite frustrated with it. The Fashionista was able to make one up pretty quickly.

 

The last activity of chapter one was to make a solar system with balloons but I remembered that I had this in the craft cupboard so gave them this to make instead.

 

 

The planets are black on one side of the cardboard but along the edge we ran some glow in the dark paint so they will light up in the evening. They weren't too scale as they needed to balance. They worked well together making it up.

Here's the finished product which they told me the Papa has to hang in the study ... their learning room apparently.