Welcome to unit five of our astronomy studies! Lately, we have been learning all about The Moon.
As before, we have been using Apologia’s Exploring Creation with Astronomy. Also, I have access to Everyday Astronomy from School House Teachers, as well as lots of bits and pieces I used with my older ones that I have collected over the years:
Facts About The Moon
The girls wrote some brief notes about the moon:
And put together the following moon mini book, filling in all the required details:
They also did some copywork:
Revolution of The Moon Around the Earth
I had the girls demonstrate (as described in the Apologia text books) the revolution of the moon around the earth (ball=moon and head=earth):
They also built and painted a plastic model kit of the moon and earth I had found in a charity shop. This was great for demonstrating the moon’s revolution around the earth:
Phases of The Moon
We tracked the phases of the moon over the month, and filled in some note pages:
And created some Oreo representations of those phases:
And created some notebook pages:
We attempted to show (some of) the phases of the moon using a lamp as the sun, a head (Becca’s) as the Earth and a ball on a stick as the moon:-
# Quarter Moon:
# Crescent Moon
# New Moon
The Lunar Atmosphere (or lack there of)
The girls learnt about the lack of the atmosphere on the moon and how that contributes to the large number of craters to be found, particularly on the side of the moon which faces away from us. The girls created their own craters using flour and marbles:
Engineering: Design, Build and Test a Lunar Landing Module
I wrote a post describing all we did for this tremendously fun STEM activity (click on picture to read):
Man on The Moon
We read the following books together:
And then the girls built the spaceship which made it to the moon all those years ago. This was left over from the older ones’ space study so I’m afraid I do not remember where I got it from:
They explored the whole spaceship:
The Difficulty of Landing on The Moon
We talked about the difficulty in shooting a spaceship up into space to land on the moon when both the earth and the moon are constantly moving. I set up an activity to try to demonstrate this. Click on the picture below if you’d like more detail:
The Challenges of Working in Space
We also did a very quick activity to demonstrate how hard it is to work in zero-gravity with a spacesuit on. I wrote about this in a separate post, so, again, click on the picture below if you’d like to read more:
As a treat, at the end of a very busy, fun-filled moon-themed week, we all snuggled down as a family to watch Apollo 13 whilst munching on chilli and being kept cosy-snug with a log burning fire. Happy days!
What a great week we have had!