[Chaos-l] Astronomy for kinesthetic learners?

[Jon Stewart-Taylor]

Hi again all.  Almost a third of the kids in Kathleen's Astronomy Club  
at Burgaw MS got put in the club because attendance in some club is  
mandatory (gotta love bureaucracies), they didn't sign up for any club  
themselves,  and "... well, Astronomy is so _interesting_!  Surely  
they'll come around after they see what it's like!" (Gotta love  
bureaucrats).

Rather than starting by assuming the kids are lazy, anti-social, or  
stupid, Kathleen is going to try assuming that the traditional club  
activities don't suit their learning style.  And, since the vast  
majority of the clubs are about sitting and looking (there are _no_  
sports clubs at all, nor hiking, birding, or other outdoor kinds), she  
thought she should start with the assumption these are kinesthetic  
learners.

So, now we're trying to come up with astronomy activities for  
kinesthetic learners.  Up to this point, we've thought of taking the  
kids out for walks and asking questions like "How many planets do you  
see?" "How many stars do you see?" (at 3 in the afternoon, the answer  
to both questions will be "1").  "How do we know?" which can lead to  
the methods the ancient Greeks used to guestimate the sizes of the  
things in the universe.

We've thought about showing the phases of the moon by giving one  
person a flashlight, two other people get balls, and having them walk  
around in "orbits", showing how the illumination changes.  From there  
we can  show we know the planets orbit the sun instead of the earth,  
and how we know about inner and outer planets.

For how we know the earth orbits the sun, we thought about putting a  
tennis ball on a string, then having the tennis ball orbit the kids,  
and try to have the kids orbit the tennis ball.  The string is  
gravity, see, and the relative masses of the sun and the earth are the  
kid and the tennis ball, see, and...

We can do the standard parallax walk to work up the idea of how far  
away stars are, which leads us back to how do we know the sun is a star.

Anyway, anybody have any other ideas?  Heard of anything like this  
that you can point us at?

Thanks.

J.
-- 
Jon Stewart-Taylor:  joncst at earthlink.net
Chapel Hill Astronomy: http://www.rtpnet.org/chaos