We decided to fit in our Apologia Astronomy over the summer and it turns out that there were other families interested in this as well. We maxed out due to the size of my home and there were still more interested. If any mom is interested in doing this at their home, I'm sure we can send some families your way that didn't get to join. We're having so much fun!


Lesson 1 - What is Astronomy

I didn't get a picture of the balloon project we did together, but we all blew up balloons accoding to scale down values in our book. We decorated the ballons to look like each planet. I don't suppose I realize how huge our sun is. Most models and pictures we see of our solar system have to misrepresent the size of our sun because you wouldn't be able to see the planets! Incredible!


Below is a solar system activity we did that was in the "bookextras" link on the Apologia website. This helped us to understand the distance between the planets. Since you have to have a password to access the info, I added that info here:
http://stricklandfamilycircle.blogspot.com/2008/06/solar-system-activity.html
There are neat activities like this all through the book!

Lesson 2 - The Sun
We really had fun today!!! We got to do three activities plus some. We made a pinhole viewing box so that we could view the sun safely. If you looked close enough, you could see some sun spots in your box.

Then, we got out the CHOCOLATE! We picked up lots of magnifying glasses at Analytical Scientific for .95 each. Every child got to melt some cholocate with the power of sun energy. One of them actually smoked and created a little flame! They got to eat their chocolate afterwards. How fun!

So, the reason this works is because they focused the suns energy to a small point, which make that point much hotter!

We came back in to cool off. Boy, it's been about 100 degrees every day this week! When we came in, we turned off the lights. We used our globe, a small ball and a flashlight to see what an eclipse looks like from space. That was fun.

Afterwards, we had a few presentations that were excellent!!! I am so impressed with the work these kids do and the excitement to do it! If you are a mom in this group, please consider sharing the writings your children shared on this post. (Click on the pencil on the bottom of this post. You will have to have a google ID which is very easy).

Below is a revolution/ rotation activity. The young lady in the middle is the sun. The darlin' a little shorter is the Earth and the doll-baby in the white shirt is the moon.. getting away. :-)

The object of this activity was for the sun to stay put, the earth to rotate and revolve around the sun and the moon to revolve around the Earth. It was fun to get it down!

Also part of this lesson was about why we see color. Taylor got a whole new complex idea of color and it was an excellent refresher for my high school physics study! Look it up some time... it's very interesting... another fingerprint of our mighty and awesome God!

Stay tuned to lesson 3! We'll be studying Mercury.