Skip to main content

Lesson Plans - Astronomy Unit









Monday - We just got back from Thanksgiving break so I did some review. Our science fair projects are due this week so I spent some time reviewing the requirements and I let some early submissions present to the class. This didn't leave a lot of time left but I was able to go over the difference between rotation and revolution. I got the kids up and moving rotating and revolving. The main lesson was really for students to learn why we have day and night. I showed a streamline video on the subject and taught them a poem I made up with hand gestures (will post video). The end results were that my students should have been able to tell me the difference between rotation and revolution, how long does it take Earth to rotate, how long does it take for the Earth to complete a revolution around the Sun, and why does that rotation give us day and night. The only thing we did in our notebooks was to record the current moon phase on the calendar in our notebook.

Tuesday - Students took turns reading the day and night notebook page that was glued to the left hand side of the notebook. We reviewed the poem and hand gestures we learned the day before. On the right hand side students wrote and illustrated the poem and then colored. We recorded our current moon phase and then played vocabulary BINGO in our notebooks.

Wednesday - Recorded moon phase of the day. Reviewed rotation, revolution, day and night, and our poem. Lesson today was on why Earth experiences seasons. I put together a PowerPoint that I showed the students with embedded video clips...which was the first time I had done that and it did not work that well. The video didn't keep pace with the audio. I was able to show the video clips by themselves but I was disappointed it didn't work like it was suppose to. Will try again...going to see if putting them in a Promethean flip chart might be better. Showed a short BrainPop video on seasons. We read the right hand "Seasons" Information and put together a seasons flip foldable for the left hand side. Taught students a kinesthetic way to remember why we have seasons with hand gestures (I have a lot of students who like to "move" and this is a good way to let them get their need to move out during a lesson).

Thursday - Recorded moon phase of the day. Promethean review of everything we have learned this week. We watched Bill Nye video on Seasons. Gave students a quiz that accompanied the video. Recorded moon phase in the notebook.

Friday - All science fair projects were turned in so we spent the class periods presenting. This went well with two out of the three classes and was a disaster in one of my classes. The students in that class do not do well in a "sit and listen" environment so I spent most of the class period frustrated that students weren't listening, staying in their seats, etc. I should have given that class some focus during the presentations...i.e. given them a review sheet to fill out, or limited presentations to two minutes and had a timer, etc. Oh well, live and learn :)
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Picture of the Day - Activity

I attended a training class and a science coach shared an activity that he does with his students to help them differentiate between observations, inferences, and predictions. He puts a picture on the interactive white board as a warm up (he gets the pictures from a variety of sources but uses National Geographic's Picture of the Day a lot). The picture above is from the National Geographic site. He has the students make five observations. Then he makes the students make five inferences. Finally he has the students make five predictions. He does this every day and it really drives home the difference between those three key inquiry vocabulary terms. I've done this activity with both my sixth and fourth grade science classes and the students really got into it and became proficient at telling me the difference between those terms.
13 comments
Read more

Weathering, Erosion, and Deposition Activity

I saw this activity at a science conference years ago and haven't had a chance to use it in a classroom until this week (mainly because I didn't teach weathering, erosion, and deposition). It is a great way to reinforce the definition of the weathering, erosion, and deposition in a highly kinesthetic manner. Basically you break the students up into groups of three. One group is "Weathering" another group is "Erosion" and the third group is "Deposition". Add tape to the back because you are going to stick them to the forehead of the children in each group. The "weathering" students get a sheet of paper that is their "rock" they will be breaking down. At the start of the activity the "weathering" students will start ripping tiny pieces of their "rock" and handing it to the "erosion" students. The "erosion" students will be running their tiny piece of "rock&
5 comments
Read more

Bill Nye Songs with Lyrics

At the end of the Bill Nye videos he always has a fun song that goes with the episode. You can find many of the songs as stand alone videos on YouTube. This came in handy because today I am teaching a lesson on layers of the atmosphere and found a song from his Atmosphere video on YouTube titled "Fresh Aire." I really wanted to remix it and put the lyrics on the video (so the kids could sing along and see how the lyrics matched the lesson). The first thing I did was found a site that has all the Bill Nye lyrics posted used my YouTube downloader ( see instructions here ) and downloaded the song. I then imported the video into Movie Maker Live and used the caption feature to put the lyrics on the different frames (cutting and pasting from the lyrics site into Movie Maker Live). I saved the video and reposted to YouTube so other teachers could use the video with lyrics (the finished video is posted above). The process was pretty easy and I am thinking about doing it for more
Post a Comment
Read more