Astronomy Unit Study

I have been wanting to collect all my astronomy activities into one huge go-to Astronomy Unit Study post, and finally, here it is! We are taking a day off school today thanks to finishing all I had planned yesterday. Yay! The littles have a friend coming round, and the older ones are fan girling over some band they are going to see next week end. We are crazy busy tomorrow, so I am planning to spend today holed up in my bedroom school planning. I have loved being back to normal (non-exam) school this week and am excited to knuckle down and put together some ideas for next week.

Anyway, here are all our Astronomy activities and links in one place for easy reference:

Astronomy: Unit One – The Solar System

This was the beginning of a two year adventure into our solar system. The girls just loved this unit, with lots of hands on activities to introduce them to the fascinating subject of space:

Astronomy Unit Study: Unit Two – The Sun

The next unit was all about the sun. I even got the older girls involved by getting Charlotte to interview the sun (Lillie!). We finished off the unit by making some very accurate sun inspired cookies!

Astronomy Unit Study: Unit Three – Mercury

Next, we learnt about Mercury and the girls had an enormous amount of fun designing a poster to advertise life on Mercury:

Astronomy Unit Study: Unit Four – Planet Venus

Again, this was a fascinating unit on Venus. The girls learnt how radar worked and were surprised by its accuracy! We made lava trickle down our flour volcano and did some experiments to learn about atmospheres:

Astronomy Unit Study: Unit Five – Planet Earth

Earth was fascinating, and of course very familiar. We did a stack of activities, but the favourite was (of course) when they made a very sticky model of planet earth, which looked nothing like planet earth!

Astronomy Unit Study: Unit Six – The Moon

This was my favourite unit to teach. There was just too many activities to describe – so you should just head over to the post!

Astronomy Unit Study: Unit Seven – Planet Mars

Learning about planet Mars was just as interesting and as tasty. My girls love anything food related so of course they used lots of sugar to create some very realistic models of Mars Rover. We also made rust and created a model of a possible ecosystem for man to survive on Mars. Such fun!

Astronomy Unit Study: Unit Eight – Space Rocks

It handily snowed around the time we did this module, so we were able to make all sorts of models of varying space rocks:

Astronomy Unit Study: Unit Nine: Jupiter

The unit brought about the publication of the Jovian News; more edible models and a very nifty activity involving a model of Juno. We do like our models here at Angelicscalliwags:

Astronomy Unit Study: Unit Ten – Saturn

Learning about Saturn, we made a messy non-edible model, made various rockets and did an incredible gravity assist demonstration:

Astronomy Unit Study: Unit Eleven – Uranus and Neptune

Again, much fun was had making yet another model comparing the two planets. Oh, and there was an experiment which included creating a stink bomb rotten egg smell to replicate these two planets’ atmospheres!

Astronomy Unit Study: Unit 12 – Pluto and the Kuiper Belt

We were winding down at this stage, but we still managed to make a model (of course) and roped in an elder sister to put on a readers’ theatre play about Pluto:

Astronomy Unit Study: Unit 13 – Stars and the Kuiper Belt

The stars was our last foray into space. We made twinkling stars as well as various other demonstrations:

Interspersed between these units, w found the time to learn about how difficult it would be working in space, without gravity and with a space suit on:

As well as doing an activity which demonstrated just how important flight path trajectory is to launch a space ship into space:

And lastly, we got Daddy involved as he and the littles designed and tested a lunar landing module. So much fun: