[Chaos-l] Astronomy for kinesthetic learners?

[Tony Rice]

Pick 8 of 'em and line them up in the order of the planets.  Pick the
kids based on the color of their shirts.  Then start to space the out
according to the distance of the planets.

Estimate the Earth's tilt and circumference using Eratosthenes's
methods.  This is very hands on.  Nothing like making a direct
connection with math and real life to spark something in a kid.

Also, the Night Sky Network has some good hands on activities here:
http://nightsky.jpl.nasa.gov/download-search.cfm

-Tony

On Sun, Sep 18, 2011 at 2:53 PM, Jon Stewart-Taylor
<joncst at earthlink.net> wrote:
> 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
>
>
>
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>
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