Notebooking, Teaching, and Technology

The Planetary Society has partnered with the U.S. National Park Service to create an Junior Ranger Eclipse Explorer activity book. You can download the PDF for free of the book. It is pretty colorful so you may want to print it in black and white. If you have classes tomorrow (Monday, August 21st) you might want to consider that as an activity for the day. Parents can then take their child to the nearest National Park to get their badge for completing the activities in the book. Definitely call ahead though to make sure they have badges. The program is only offered at NATIONAL parks not STATE ones (I called our State Park without thinking but they pointed me in the right direction). Happy Eclipse!

Here in South Carolina we will be in the path of a full eclipse on Monday, August 21st. Many schools in the state have pushed their start date for students to Tuesday, August 22nd, as the eclipse is due to occur at dismissal time for many of the schools and their is concern about walk/biking home in the dark as well as curious students looking directly at the sun. In our district students will be going back-to-school two days earlier (17th/18th) with the 21st off for teacher PD. Our district science coordinator has arranged for free solar eclipse classes to be given to all students K-12 and has put together resources for teachers to use during lesson planning. Just about every grade level will get a lesson on what an eclipse is and how it occurs, as well as general safety tips. With that said, I have been on the look out for science resources related to the eclipse as well. Today one from Mystery Science came up on my Twitter feed. Mystery Science is a subscription based s