Tuesday, February 14, 2017

Second Grade Shinning Bright!

A couple of weeks ago, we talked about stars! We looked at the Sun as a star, then talked about constellations. We started the week off with our Sun BrainPOP on Monday.



Tuesday, we talked about how the sun makes it's own light and how we can see shadows depending on where the sun is in the sky. The kids made paper plate sun dials to take home and see the different times of the day by looking at the shadows the sun makes a the Earth spins around!








This girl gets me! :)







Once they finished their sun dials, I poked a hole in the middle for them so they could put their popsicle sticks in the middle (but we put those in their class baggies so they didn't lose or break them). We used flashlights to show how the shadow from the popsicle stick would change directions and look like it was moving, just like the sun would!






Wednesday was the 100th day of school, so we skipped our star study and had a 100th day of school engineering day! Thursday, we were right back at our science work. We talked about constellations and how they are pictures that the stars make when you connect them. I pulled up our sky apps so we could see the different objects in the sky and find some constellations.


The kids paired up and walked around the room viewing the different objects in the sky and trying to find constellations and the pictures they made!

**Some of the pictures might be hard to see. We were walking around in a dark room so that our constellations would be easier to see and so it would feel like nighttime!

Before I let the kids loose to look at constellations on their own, I showed them what the app looked like on our SMART board and saw if they could guess what each of the constellations was before we used the app that gave us the answers.

We had to tilt our heads sideways for some of the constellations. This is one of my favorite pictures.






The Sun
 







Ursa Major (The Big Dipper)



Sagittarius 




Cancer the Crab


Friday, the kids made their own constellations telescopes. They each got a piece of paper to draw their design on.
First they traced the bottom of their cups onto the paper to see how much space they had to work with.






Then, they drew their dots to show where they wanted their stars to be and how they wanted their constellations formed.







Once their drawings were finished, they placed their papers over the bottom of their cups and used pushpins to poke the holes through the paper and into the cup, revealing their designs!







With their constellation telescopes finished, they looked through theirs and their friends to see what everyone made! There were a lot of cool ones!

















I LOVE teaching the kids and talking about constellations with them! It's one of my favorite things to do. And they did an AWESOME job!