Landing Back on Earth

As second quarter comes to a close, our outer space unit is quickly ending as well. The inner space cadet in me is very sad and I'm not quite ready to move on.... but alas! There's always next year. 

Here's a peak at a few of the activities we did this month to learn about Earth and its planetary neighbors. If you would like more information on any activity, please email me! I love chatting with teachers around the country. [jordon.furnell@gmail.com]

Toilet Paper Solar System. Read more about that exciting adventure here. 

How Far Can You Jump in Space? A fun activity that tied math, graphing, science, and technology together. 

Oreo Cookie Moon Phases. Now that we've eaten both the Sun and the Moon, one student has requested that we eat all 8 planets. I told him that I'd work on that one. :)

Google Earth. Yesterday, I blogged about using Google Earth to explore not only Earth, but the Moon, Mars, and the sky! Read about it here. 

Designing Constellations with Chalk. We spent a morning outlining constellations on black paper. Read about it here. 

Phases of the Moon. Thank goodness for Mr. Parr and his oh-so-creative Youtube channel.  My kids LOVE his science songs and it's a hoot watching them sing along. One of our (uhh..my) favorites is the Phases of the Moon one. Check it out below!

SKYPE! Today, we had the pleasure of chatting with both John and Barbara down in Texas. My kids were incredibly excited to speak LIVE with someone who works at NASA. What an incredible experience! 

That's just a snapshot of what we've been up to this month. Also just a snapshot of everything I remembered to take a picture of. Next, we'll be studying force and motion. 

Tips? I'm all ears!

It's Only Monday, and We've Already Been to Mars

The other day, I accidentally opened up Google Earth and a tip popped up that said, "Explore the Moon!" I shrieked at my desk and started exploring. My exploration didn't stop there. With the simple click of a button I was exploring Mars and the sky too! Needless to say, I had to find a way to work this into my lesson plans. Lucky for my students (and me!), we had to talk about why Earth is the best candidate to support life in the solar system. I felt this would be an engaging and meaningful way to explore other celestial bodies in our galaxy. 

This morning I posed the question, "Why is Earth the best place to call home?" Our plan for the day was to contrast Earth, the Moon, and Mars and determine why Earth is the best place for us to live. We hopped down to the computer lab and opened up Google Earth. I gave very few directions, because I wanted my students to do most of the exploring. In a whole group setting, I demonstrated how to navigate between the planets (Click View then Explore...) and sent them on their merry way. Each student also had a triple t-chart in their notebooks to write down features of Earth, Mars, and the Moon. To conclude class we watched a BrainPop video about Earth and wrote down all of the reasons why Earth is perfect for us. 

Exploring the Moon with Neil Armstrong!

While students were working, I moved around the lab and suggested different areas to click and showed students a few more neat features. For example, you can take a guided tour of the Moon and Mars complete with narration! 

Just Taking a Tour of the Moon...

I strongly encouraged students to Explore BEFORE Asking...that way, they wouldn't be dependent on me. Most were very excited about the lesson and teaching me new things about the program. It was a great start to our Monday. 

We Landed on the Moon!

Tomorrow, we are participating in an incredible Skype session. Thanks to the wonderful Barbara and her beautiful blog The Corner on Character, for making it all happen. 

Before I scoot, I must say a few things about the heartbreaking tragedy that happened in Connecticut on Friday. In my mind, I cannot piece together an appropriate set of words to even make sense of the unthinkable situation. My heart is with those affected and those poor children and faculty who lost their lives. I made sure to tell all of my students how wonderful it was to see them and their bright shining faces this morning. After all, they are the reason for why we do what we do. The Cornerstone For Teachers wrote an incredible post titled, "What Do You Say at a Time Like This?". I leave you with her words, because I can't seem to find my own. 

NASA, Call Me Maybe?

Here's a weird question for you, what do Carly Rae Jepson and NASA have in common? Well, click the YouTube video below to figure it out. Some quirky folks compiled video and images from the NASA Curiosity Rover mission and made themselves a little parody video. It was also a catchy way to get my students thinking about how we study space. 

After more discussion about telescopes and satellites, we started talking one of NASA's current missions, "Curiosity". They were floored when I informed them that it had just landed back in August. To get a better look at the Rover, we spent some time playing on this incredible "Explore Mars!" web application. Click here to check it out for yourself. In a nutshell, students could drive the rover around Mars, check out the crater in which it landed, and read about various tasks the Curiosity is working on.

Call Me, Maybe? NASA photo. 

I only have 6 student computers in my classroom, so we had to do a little sharing. While one set of students were on the computer, I was explaining a fun writing assignment to the others. Using images taken from Curiosity of Mars found here, the students were to write a postcard BACK to Earth from Curiosity. I let the students click through the gallery and select which image they wanted to write about. Here are a few of my favorite images from the gallery. 

Small Debris.

Wheel Scuff.

Exploring Mars was AWESOME today, but we did run into a few hiccups. The application was running very slow on our student computers so some students didn't get the full experience. I hope to pull up the application again so we can try it out another afternoon when we have some free time. 

For the next couple of days we'll be talking about our Solar System.

Happy Monday!

Galaxies & Constellations

There are many reasons why December is one of my favorite months, but one BIG reason is because we are studying OUTER SPACE! There's something about teaching outer space that makes my heart skip a beat. We're just diving into our universe, but we have started by identifying our location (in the Milky Way) and how that compared to other groups of stars (also known as...constellations) In 5th grade, we do not assess constellations or put much focus on them, but it connects to how our Earth rotates on its axis. It was enlightening for many students to understand how we see different constellations at different times of the year... depending on where we are on the globe. 

To compare constellations and galaxies, we created a Double Bubble Thinking Map. Side note, in this unit I'm REALLY trying to incorporate the use of more and more thinking maps. They're incredible ways to organize information and another great way to take notes. For example, we created a brace map at the beginning of our unit to write down vocabulary words and associate them in groups. Now, back on track! Below, you see a student working with his group to pull information from a resource page and the text book and create a double bubble. After the small groups worked for 5-7 minutes, we shared out our new information and created a class double bubble. 

After we had ironed out the differences between galaxies and constellations... we started creating! Students were given months, chalk, a guide, and stars. Badda bing... badda boom! 

Today, I was trying to decide what to DO with the constellations and I thought, "Duh.. we need to look up." I hopped on a table and started tacking them to the ceiling. At the end of the day, we all stared into the "sky" and found constellations! 

Tomorrow, we're continuing our conversation about the SUN ... our closest star!