The Sun

My son Zak as "The Sun"

We have spent the last two weeks discovering the sun. We melted chocolate with our maginfying glasses using the power of the sun to do this. We all thought the sun would obviously melt the chocolate but we were surprised when it caught on fire and burned. We read from Expolring Creation with Astronomy about the sun and we put some mini books together based upon our reading. Our mini books came from Journey Through Learning lapbook, and Knowledge Box Central lapbook.

Here is Zak writing information in the solar eclipse book.

Here is Max's first page.

We made small suns, moons and earths to demonstrate the idea of revolve and rotate. To further this demo I was inspired by this photo I saw over at Martha Stewart's site and we made sun, moon and earth masks and shot a short video.

Our masks: Zak is the Earth, Max is the sun and TJ is the moon. They switch roles in the you-tube video below.

T.J.'s color of the sun mini book.

We learned from our reading that the sun is not really yellow or orange as wee see it here on earth, but that particles in the atmosphere change its real color which is white to what we are used to seeing. Did you know that white light is really all of the colors blended together. That is what our mini book here is all about. Cool!

We didn't know that the sun is really getting brightter and brightter. Thermonuclear fusion or explosions within the sun keep it going and brightening. This is good evidence that the earth is not old as some say but truely only thousands of years old. Otherwisw the earth millions of years ago would have been so dim and cold that the earth would have frozen into an ice ball.

Zak's solar flares, sunspots and auras mini book. Pictures are worth a thousand words!

Max's solar eclipse mini book. After we did this experiemnt below and had a better idea what solar eclipses are we filled in the min books.

With a flash light, a round white ball, a string and a blow up globe we looked at annual eclipses, total eclipses, partial eclipses and talked about what makes baily's beads occur. This topic is so much clearer with this demo than just reading about it in the book.

Max's Magnifying glass. Remember not to look at the sun!

God.

We discovered that the sun is roughly 93,000,000 miles from the earth.

Well that concludes our look at the sun. We topped off the week with a solar system map drill and a fun read of The Magic School Bus story of Lost in the Solar System. Until next week... when we will see you on planet mercury.