Is Pluto a planet writing assignment

When I think of homeschool science, I tend to think of blowing stuff up, hands on investigation, I don’t think of writing.  But, writing can be a great way to explore ideas, and for my words-oriented daughter, it can be a great way to get her excited about our homeschool science (besides best practices are to make subject cross-curricular, and include some homeschool writing).  When we reached the chapter on Pluto in our astronomy book, it talked about how it used to be a planet, and no longer is.

This greatly upset my kids, in particular my daughter who is the youngest, and smallest, and didn’t like the idea of the smallest being demoted.  So, I did what any good homeschool Mom would do, and I gave them an assignment: prove to me that Pluto is or is not a planet.

Is Pluto a planet rubric

As always with my writing assignments I gave them a rubric to work from.  It had the usual things you would expect, capitalization, indenting, spelling.  I also included things like facts, opinions, and other important details for persuasive papers.  My kids really like writing persuasive papers, but that’s a post for another day.

Writing their “Is Pluto a planet?” assignment

Since the kids had to include facts to back up their opinion they set to researching (how to write a research paper).   They researched with their Apologia Astronomy book.

Their final papers on “Is Pluto a planet?”

Of course these, are the ones I could find.  After holding on to the assignments for over a year, I can’t find any of them.  I’m very annoyed with myself.  That’s the problem with writing posts almost a year after an assignment is given, you don’t have all of the details and information you need.  Long and short of it, all three kids concluded Pluto is a planet based off of details from their textbook.   They made credible arguments overall.

Need some more astronomy ideas?  Try some of these ideas

Space Exploration Unit– Science should be interactive, and this is

Jupiter Science lesson– To warn you, this can get messy….

Venus activities for kids– My kids had so much fun “trying” out sonar

Mercury lesson– You probably already have everything you need in your kitchen