Tag: solar system

Posted in family life, wwlw

what we’re learning wednesday, episode 11: field trip to lowell observatory

Posted on by kristinabean

Through a fortuitous combination of a Groupon deal for tickets to Lowell Observatory and my mom’s travel bug, we were able to travel up to Flagstaff for a weekend and take Rondel and Limerick to the observatory one evening while we were there, without worrying about a late night drive home or an overtired Aubade.

I had been to Lowell before, but not since before college, so I didn’t remember much, and it was of course all new to the boys. Paul and I split up near the beginning, and I went with Limerick who absolutely loved every inch of it. He sat through an entire 45 minute talk about the solar system, explored the old telescope through which Clyde Tombaugh discovered Pluto, and got to see both Jupiter and Saturn through the massive telescopes set up for public use. (He was so cute looking through them – he had to climb all the way up the ladder to look through the view piece, and he kept pausing to tell me about everything he could see: storm bands on Jupiter, the four Galilean moons, Saturn’s rings, and some of Saturn’s moons as well, until the observatory volunteer told him that it was time to let someone else have a turn 🙂 ). Lowell also has a large globe that can display in three dimensions images of various planets and moons, and Limerick enjoyed experimenting with that as well.

I think both boys’ favorite part, however, was the Solar System walk stretching through the heart of the observatory grounds. The walk starts with the Sun and has a sign for each planet along with two bronze markers in the sidewalk denoting the aphelion and perihelion of each planet’s orbit. The distance between the markers is all to scale, of course, and reveals just how close together the rocky inner planets are compared to the outer gas giants. We’d done a smaller scale model in our house, but when you have to keep walking and walking to find Neptune, because the scale is larger, it has more of an impact. We did the walk through twice, marveling at how elliptical some orbits were compared to others (Mercury, for example, has a distance of almost 24 million kilometers between its aphelion and perihelion, while the near and far points of Venus’s orbit are only 1.5 million kilometers different), and probably would have done it again if it hadn’t gotten too dark.

While Flagstaff at the end of October is cold in the evenings, it was definitely worth it to be above the city in the dark, clear air; the boys had never seen the sky so full of stars, and I was able to show them the cloudy glow of the Milky Way arching across the night sky as well. It made me think of how humanity must have seen the heavens throughout history: a tapestry of light spread wide above them, telling the stories of their people, singing the praises of God. For both science – the desire to learn, to know, to explain – and story – the desire to remember, to understand, to give meaning – are fundamentally human and find a home in the stars above.

Posted in family life, sqt, Uncategorized

{sqt} – because my kids are weird and wonderful

Posted on by kristinabean
  1. No one is ever interested if I offer to read them a book, but if I sit down on the couch and start reading aloud I am covered in children within two minutes.
  2. Aubade currently refuses to be called anything except her first name. Literally. To the extent that she takes offense at being called beautiful, or helpful, or big, or little, or tough, or silly. I’ll say, “I love you little girl!” and she’ll reply, “I’m not a little girl, I’m an Aubade!” The exception is if she’s playing a pretend game, in which case she is usually a little alligator and objects to being called anything other than that…
Aubade twirling in a blue dress with a pink lei around her head and a ponytail sticking up
  1. Everything is fair game to become part of a Solar System. Countless rocks have been pressed into service as various planets; all the balls and balloons in the house have been used multiple times; and Limerick and I even built a version using pattern blocks the other day. The most amusing was when we went to the grocery store and the boys planned out a whole Solar System using the different varieties of pumpkin in the fall display… I think they were inspired by the pumpkin that was so big they could have curled up inside it, which made a rather stunning Sun 🙂
Mercury is the single hexagon block on the far left, followed by the other seven planets in order. The tiny green triangle in between Mars and Jupiter is the dwarf planet Ceres.
  1. If I clean up the brain flakes, so all three jars are full and there are no more random pieces lying around on the floors, the kids will pounce upon them like a tiger on its prey and immediately dump them all back out and begin building as if the world contained nothing else. They usually stay cleaned up for no more than ten minutes, and that’s if I attempt to hide them…
  2. Aubade has quite a unique fashion sense. This morning she was wearing an overall dress with no shirt underneath but a skirt instead. The other day I came home from work to find her dressed in pants and a t-shirt with a tunic tank top and shorts layered over it. She also is very adamant about wearing socks and usually has at least six out around the house at any one time (she likes to layer the socks, too, on her hands and her feet).
Slightly blurry image of Aubade in pink heart pants, orange monster shorts, pink t-shirt, and sparkly navy tank, with a pink tiara on her head and a purple wild tied around her ankle. She never holds still for pictures…
  1. Rondel must be approaching some sort of growth spurt, because he is eating ridiculous amounts of food. The other day I roasted four medium potatoes and four large carrots and he ate all of them, plus two pieces of toast, just for breakfast. Another day I made a batch of waffles (whole grains, loaded with carrots, an extra egg for more protein) and he ate four of them (I was full after two, for comparison). And he tells me all day long that he is hungry. I’m starting to be nervous about how much he’ll be able to eat as a teenager!
  2. Limerick asked me, after seeing a selfie my mom took with Rondel when he was a baby, how she could take the picture and be in it at the same time. This was the result. Pretty much sums up how good life is with these crazy awesome kids 🙂
Limerick hugely smiling with his mouth open wide and his eyes shut tight, leaning on my shoulder.
Posted in wwlw

what we’re learning wednesday, episode 10

Posted on by kristinabean

To incorporate some math into our current space-themed enthusiasm, I came up with a new game that we have been calling Space Race. All you need are three dice, a deck of cards, and some sort of token for each player, so it’s pretty easy to set up.

Using all 13 cards from one suit, we have enough cards to represent the sun, all 8 planets, and 4 dwarf planets (Limerick’s favorites). While you could line up the cards from 1-13 in order from the Sun outwards, Limerick prefers to assign each card to the appropriate planet according to its ranking by mass, as follows:

Sun13 (King)
Mercury5
Venus7
Earth8
Mars6
Ceres1
Jupiter12 (Queen)
Saturn11 (Jack)
Uranus9
Neptune10
Pluto4
Haumea3
Makemake2

In the table above note that the dwarf planets are italicized and that Uranus, despite having a larger diameter than Neptune, has less mass and is therefore given a smaller number. If you had cards going up higher than 13 you could incorporate more dwarf planets, but that would also make the game longer.

On a player’s turn, they roll the three dice and attempt to use the three numbers rolled to make the number of the planet to which they wish to launch a probe. Once they show how they can reach a planet’s number using basic arithmetic (addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division), they can place a token on that planet’s card to symbolize the successful mission of their spacecraft. If the player is unable to make the number of any planet to which they have not already launched a probe, that turn is considered a “failed launch” and play proceeds to the next person. The goal is to be the first player to send spacecraft to the Sun and all the planets.

We have these awesome cards with non-standard suits, one of which is little rocket ships! And the face cards, while still called J, Q, and K, have the correct number of rocket ships on them which is helpful for this sort of game. We use brain flakes for our tokens since we have a lot of them in multiple colors, but Legos or coins would also work well.

If the game is too easy or goes by too fast with open-ended launch destinations, a more challenging variation is to select a specific order in which the planets need to be reached – smallest to largest or center of the Solar System outward, for example. Limerick prefers this variation; it forces him to be more creative with his use of the numbers while also removing the need to decide which planet to choose when there are multiple options. Rondel prefers the original more flexible version, however, since it allows him to launch to the first planet he is able to find a solution for and lets him play with the math skills he is more comfortable using. I would encourage the more flexible version if you have players who are primarily relying on addition and subtraction, and the ordered variant for players who are comfortable with simple multiplication and division as well. Either way, it’s fun and it’s good math practice – always a winning combination 🙂

Posted in family life

lift off!

Posted on by kristinabean

Our biomes curriculum started off by introducing our planet’s location in the Solar System – it’s kind of important, after all, since the sun plays such a crucial role in shaping climate, determining the seasons, and maintaining life. It’s intended to be just a brief overview, before diving down more deeply into Earth itself, but both Rondel and Limerick have become completely, utterly captivated by outer space.

Limerick in particular has attacked it with his rather academic and obsessive bent, spending hours poring through images of the sun and the planets (always in order, from Mercury outward, including the dwarf planets), asking me to read and reread the books we have in the house, getting out the play dough day after day to model the solar system and using the kitchen scale to make his planets as close to an accurate scale as he can. (Since it’s finicky in its old age and won’t switch from standard to metric units, he’s gotten some practice working with pounds and ounces as well. It is rather irritating when something needs to be 1000 times larger than something else and you have to divide by 16 to get the correct number of pounds.)

 

(I may be to blame for his obsession with accurate scaling… for our first solar system activity, we made a scaled model of the solar system with play dough, based on NASA’s mass estimations for each planet, and measured out the appropriate distances between the planets so we could set them up down the hallway. Jupiter was so much larger that we ended up making a new double batch of play dough, using it all for Jupiter, and scaling everything else in relation to that.)

From top left, clockwise: all eight planets before placing them relative to the “sun” (the bookshelf); the whiteboard with calculations (and on the bottom a comparison of Jupiter’s mass in kg to various family members in kg); Jupiter looking out toward the other gas giants; Neptune looking in toward the “sun”; Jupiter looking in toward the inner planets.

Over the weekend, both boys decided to make paper models of the solar system as well, not to scale, but showing all the planets and the sun. They even wrote labels for each planet, which is the most handwriting they’ve ever done at one time! (Rondel’s picture is on the left and Limerick’s is on the right – Rondel included Ceres, a dwarf planet in the asteroid belt, and Limerick gave his sun quite a few solar flares.)

They’ve also been asking to read from our (admittedly small but at least quality) space book collection at bedtime and throughout the day. We’ve been cycling through Our Solar System by Seymour Simon (published in 1992, and lacking a lot of newer information), The Magic School Bus: Lost in the Solar System (published in 1990, so the same problem), and Astronomica by Fred Watson (published in 2011, absolutely massive, with amazing images and detailed information which I have to skim through to read at a level the boys can understand).

I’m planning on finding some supplementary books from the library about different space missions and picture book biographies of people involved in space exploration, so we can incorporate some history into our space study as well. We’ve already made a timeline with the lives of family members and individuals from books we’ve read, so it would be natural to include important dates in space exploration. Since ASU has a large space exploration exhibit and 3D show open to the public, I’ll probably try to incorporate that as well. And while Limerick has already used math with all the scaling he’s done, I’d like to find a way to show the boys how much math was used in designing spacecraft, planning missions, and charting the orbits of planets – Rondel enjoys math far more when it involves a topic he’s interested in. It might not have been my original plan for the beginning of the school year, but what’s the point in homeschooling, after all, if you can’t be flexible and use your children’s interests to motivate their learning?