Jupiter art and Science lesson

We are slowly working our way through our astronomy science lessons, and I’m slowly getting them up on the blog.  The further we get into our astronomy lessons the more I see why people don’t have posts for the later planets.  It’s hard to put together a good project for them.  Very very hard, but enough of my complaining, let’s look at this Jupiter art and science lesson.

(there are affiliate links here)

Jupiter art and science lesson supplies

Hi, this is future Ticia 2023, I’m updating this post and I realized I never actually talked about what I used for this lesson originally, so here goes, because there are several moving parts:

manilla paper (the pack of 500 was only $5 more than the pack of 50, pricing is weird sometimes), black construction paper, watercolors, and paintbrushes, white gel pen or white crayon (the gel pen will cover better, but using both creates a cool effect), gluestick, scissors, and Apologia astronomy

Side point, if you’re not using Apologia and don’t want to buy the text for this, then here are a few good picture books:

• Jupiter– a fairly in-depth book, geared more towards 3-4 grade
• Jupiter– a pretty decent early picture book for about 1-2 grade

The big thing is you need decent pictures of the planet Jupiter for the art lesson

Jupiter science lesson with the art process mixed in

Sigh, Future Ticia 2023 is having to completely rewrite this post practically because somehow when I updated the formatting got all weird, poor Ticia.

Jupiter is a gas giant. That means we can’t walk on it and we certainly aren’t colonizing it. That is also why Jupiter is striped. There are giant storms raging across the planet. So that is the first step in our lesson, painting stripes.

Notice I added pretend stripes to this hideously ugly square that we’re pretending is my children painting.

Now, in order to not make it completely boring and to make sure I’m not fighting children who are grumpy, I let them make their stripes in whatever colors they wanted.

Now comes the part Jupiter is famous for, the Great Red Spot (and this will be where we get into more science a little later). That Great Red Spot is bigger than earth and is a giant hurricane going for more than 300 years! THREE HUNDRED YEARS! That’s quite a storm.

This is where we discovered we don’t have particularly good watercolor paints, and I need to find some better ones, because we weren’t thrilled with any of the reds we have.

Future Ticia 2023 will add, I’ve found better ones at Hobby Lobby thanks to taking some mixed media art classes, but I’m still not super good with them. It’s something I want to improve though.

Jupiter has a zillion moons. That is one hundred percent a scientific number and strictly calculated. Most of them are random asteroids that Jupiter has attracted because of its own huge gravity (that right there can be its own post, but that’s not the point of my blog, super detailed science, I’m trying to show you how to get into hands-on learning). But, for this project we’re only concentrating on four of them, the Galilean moons.

Galileo was studying Jupiter with his telescope (which is about as strong as our binoculars now, so you can use binoculars to see these) and discovered four moons: Io, Europa, Ganymede, and Callisto. To find out more about Galileo, check out our Galileo history lesson.

So we made four moons to orbit our Jupiter of varying sizes. Some of Jupiter’s moons are the size of planets! That is just crazy! These were just vaguely round blobs painted on our manila paper.

The final step is making the background, here’s where the gel pen comes in. You can draw stars and comets of varying types for your background on the black construction paper. We tried white crayons for a while, but they just don’t have the same pop as the pens do. But it does aid in making it look like varying levels of brightness in the “sky.”

Cut out Jupiter and its moons, then glue them on your background.

Sigh, I was going to just leave the last half of the post as it was, but it looks like there is just enough in there I have to modify… So much extra work for me. Poor Ticia

I was going to include our Jupiter science project, but this post is already becoming ridiculously long, so next time…

Instead, here’s a bit about our week.

We survived the boys’ first slumber party. It was everything they wanted. They played board games (King of Tokyo, which I have now reviewed, that is the bottom picture), had a cookie cake, and watched Pacific Rim, and finished it all of with playing Minecraft and Disney Infinity with friends the next morning.

For school we had a fairly laid back week with not much interesting happening. We learned about a few people in history, Saint Patrick was a throwback lesson just for fun. The kids slithering out of the room is their impression of snakes slithering away from Saint Patrick. Mainly we worked on writing a lot. As I mentioned in the boys’ birthday post, I want to improve their writing, so we’ve started the great writing improvement project.

Oh, you can’t read that corner picture, but here are Superman’s sentences for his reading lesson.

Sparky is the most impossible puppy. The music at the concert was edible. I need an adorable car. The cake was invisible. Your monkey is affordable.

And it goes on, there are more like that.

For a bit of happy life. The kids decided to make their lunches into faces one day.

We had friends over on Saturday (you know after the complete lack of sleep from the party) and Princess happily played older sister.

We had family over to celebrate the boys’ birthday, and so we ate with their cousin who was quite proud to sit in a big boy chair all on his own between the two cousins. You really can’t see the size of his grin, but it’s huge.

The kids learned from their Lego magazine how to make ninja masks, and have been doing that nonstop.

Batman FINALLY got his manta ray for his birthday that he’s wanted for three years. He’s so happy with that silly thing.

And our backyard had its semi-annual flooding. It was too cold to go out in it and provide you reference shots, so I’ll refer you to this flooding post for reference.

Batman has spent the last two days sick as can be, which is part of why I didn’t get this posted earlier. While he laid in different places looking absolutely miserable, Princess and Superman read, played an unofficial version of Carcassonne (on my Nook), and worked on writing more. Oh, and they’ve started on a new geography find I’ve been playing around with Adventurous Mailbox (sadly not out of business says Future Ticia 2023), which they all find quite amusing.

Now I’m heading back to cuddling the recovering kid who I’m fairly sure shared. I do not like this type of sharing.