Astronomy, winter sky observations
What is a solar eclipse? Observing and understanding the sun with the aid of a real telescope and technology:
In today’s special stem class, we talked about solar eclipses, one of nature's most spectacular events.
We observed the surface of the sun by projecting its image on a piece of paper on which children had the chance to see at least two sunspots! Sunspots are planet-size regions of strong magnetic fields and can generate eruptive disturbances, such as solar flares and coronal mass ejections. A solar eclipse occurs when the moon “eclipses” the sun. This means that the moon, as it orbits the Earth, comes in between the sun and the Earth, thereby blocking the sun and preventing some or any sunlight from reaching us.
Earth science: The layers of our planet.
The structure of the earth is divided into three major components: the crust, the mantle and the core (inner and outer). Interestingly, it wouldn’t be a hyperbole to say that there is a small sun in the centre of our planet as The inner core is not just the hottest part of the Earth, but at over 5000 degrees Celsius, is about as hot as the surface of the sun! Along with the upper zone of the mantle, the crust is broken into big pieces, like a gigantic jigsaw puzzle. These are known as tectonic plates and move slowly — at just 3 to 5 centimeters per year and can occasionally generate seismic activity, which is responsible for what is also known an earthquake. In today’s STEM class we discussed what the Earth, is made up of and what its inside is made of. Later we carefully built our own playdough model of our planet’s interior from inside out, starting with the core, then the mantle and last but not least the crust.
Spacetime simulator
With a piece of spandex we can visualise the universe and gravity in particular, through the eyes of modern physics and Einstein’s General Relativity (GR). GR is the modern way astronomers and physicists think about gravity. We explored two main scenarios, in the first one, the “flat space”, we demonstrated motion in the absence of masses that is in the absence of gravity. In this case a particle that is acted on by no forces travels in a straight line, just like our marbles did when rolled across the spandex surface without changing direction.
In the second scenario, the space is obviously curved because of the presence of other masses (orange). In this case the motion of our marbles (representing planets or other small-sized celestial objects) under the influence of gravity is no longer a straight line. The path is now curved, bending towards the mass in the centre of the surface (orange). In the same set-up we also had the opportunity to visualise planetary and non-planetary orbits and model the motion of the Sun-Earth-Moon system.
Project: Planets 7 and 8 year olds.
We set goals with the childers about what they want to learn about his subject.
​