The Busy-Teacher: Our Favorite Star

We have been studying Earth and Sky this month. This week we are investigating "Day and Night". I was pleased that the kiddos continue to sing little song about the water cycle that they learned last week. (They still talk about the day they were "Rainmakers".) All week we have spoken about things in the sky. Of course, the standard answer of clouds and sun were given, but I continued to encourage them to think about other things that they may see. My little scientists suprised me when they came up with a fantistic list!

After this I read the book "The Sun is My Favorite Star" by Frank Asch. This book led to lots of questions and comments about stars. One student said that the sun was the biggest star; and another student said that it was not. I explained to them why the sun was "so big" to us. We talked about why the sun is important and reminded them that the sun is the reason we have different types of weather.

One of the things I always tell them during calendar time is "The sun went down and then came up." Their response is "That is one day." I have been emphasizing that one complete day and night is a "whole day" according to the calendar. The majority understand this concept.

During a recent professional development I was shown this great website: Stellarium. This program is absolutely FREE!!! The site states that it is used in many planetarium projectors. It is really neat because you can input the coorinates of where you are located, and the program runs real time day and night of your location.

The picture links to the website.

The kids sat quietly on the carpet, while we watched the sun rising from the east and setting in the west (sped up). As they asked questions, we'd pause and talk about it. It was fun watching their expressions as they watched the day go by and transform into night.

The night sky is fantastic! I showed the kids the different constellations (The program will label them and even show the pictures.) They were mesmerized. We watched it for about 20 minutes. They were very curious about why the stars "went away" during the daytime.

Tomorrow we are going to make a sun.

Materials:

yellow paint
glue
water
2 cups
paint brush
paper plates
clear (iridescent) glitter
gold glitter
9 yellow construction paper triangles per student (4" x 4.5" then cut diagonally)
baby wipes

To make the glue/paint, I used equal parts glue and water and then added enough yellow paint to equal the amount of glue and water in the cup. I did try it with equal parts of all three but the paint ended up looking like a yellow glaze. Therefore, I added more yellow paint to make it darker.

After the plate was painted, one of my fab. five sons that was helping me sprinkled iridescent glitter on the plate shaking it several times with a lot of force (to be expected from a 10 year old). We counted out 10 shakes around the plate. Then he did the same with the gold glitter.

There wasn't a need to shake off extra glitter, because the 10 shakes of glitter from each bottle was just enough to make the plate glisten and sparkle.

Next, he used the glue paint to put the triangles around the sun.

He wanted to add more glitter, because some of the glitter could no longer be seen. Tomorrow, I plan to have the kids glue on the triangles first and then add the glitter. We repeated the process (minus the triangles) on the other side of the plate, because I want to hang the suns in the classroom.