The Sun Unit: hands on projects and an excuse to use chocolate

I figured starting out with a title like that will get your attention, right?  I’m sure you’re wondering how we used chocolate for our sun unit. I’ll tell you it did make for a very messy but fun science lesson and a great way to dive deeper into our astronomy lessons.

I’ll also admit part of why I’m excited by our sun unit is I actually used one of the ideas I linked to in the astronomy ideas for kids post.

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Sun unit activity 1: Rotation and Revolution around the sun

This may not be true for your kids, but I’ve found ways to get them excited about learning, and one of those is to say: “all right, now let’s go outside.”  Their curiosity is immediately piqued.

So we headed outside, and I drew a chalk sun on the ground and told them to grab some balls.  Now they were even more interested.  They reappeared about 2 minutes later with a Basketball, Volleyball, and a Soccer Ball.  I drew a chalk circle on the driveway and wrote sun.  Actually, I appropriated a chalk circle from an earlier activity, crossed out the number 3 and wrote sun.

Then they got to work revolving around the sun.  First I just had 2 planets and they all revolved around the sun.  Then I added in the moon revolving around Earth as the two planets revolved around the sun.

This of course meant there had to be a lot of giggling.  A lot of giggling.

Finally, they all had to revolve and rotate at the same time.  That ended with dizzy but happy kids.  Oh, and then they all had to change jobs.  It got very confusing and hectic after a while, but they got the concept down.

Sun unit activity 2: Focus the power of the sun

You want to know the next best way to get your kids excited about learning?  Involve chocolate and fire.  I can guarantee your kids will love the lesson.

Supplies: Jumbo Magnifying Glass for Kids , Hershey Bar (wow Amazon your price is terrible), white dish set (I have to admit I’m linking to this for purely silly reasons, last year my MIL gave me a very nice set of white dishes, which was perfect because we’d just broken ANOTHER plate so we didn’t have enough for us to eat on as a family)

Each kid had their own chocolate bar, which I broke in half, because I knew the kids would like to have some unmelted chocolate to eat, but we did this experiment on a plate so they could still eat the chocolate afterward.  That and I didn’t want ants swarming my driveway to eat the mess.

I pretend to have standards of cleanliness.

I showed the kids how to focus the sunlight with the magnifying glass and how if you held it at different heights and different angles you got different sizes of circles.  The smaller the circle the more focused the sunlight.  We all noticed that looking at the super small focused sunlight reflecting off our sidewalk was rather painful.

Then we set about melting and making the chocolate smoke.  Which the kids all thought was impressive Mommy, but please, let’s not ruin the chocolate for eating.  I don’t want to eat burned chocolate.

Or, that’s how I’m interpreting the cries of dismay at the scorch marks.

They liked it much better when I showed them the power of the sun by burning a hole in a leaf.  For about five seconds.  “Mommy, there’s chocolate to eat, and my feet are burning on the hot sidewalk.”

All right, then we’ll move on to:

Sun unit activity 3: Art project

I’ve had this sun craft pinned forever for this year, and now we finally completed it, in some ways I think hers turned out better, but we enjoyed ours, so I’m not complaining.

Supplies: Crayola Washable Kids Paint (though I will admit I buy mine in giant paint bottles like this: 12 pints Crayola WashableTempera Paint , I really like the Crayola tempera paint), Ziploc Double Zipper Gallon Bags , and Card Stock

1. Put random blobs on your circle of card stock (on the actual link she has a better plan)
2. Seal your paint blobbed cardstock into the ziploc bag.  Promptly have your daughter fail to listen to directions and take it out of the bag.  Suppress a sigh, and tell her to put it back in and seal it.
3. Smash the paint all over, this is really really fun.
4. Decide you don’t quite like how it looks and add random extra paint.
5. Glue your sun to a piece of black construction paper.
6. Use some leftover paint from the bag or that you’ve blobbed on again to add some solar flares.
7. Step back and enjoy your sun craft.

Oh and a certain little drama queen had to get this pose taken.  She’s meant for acting classes, isn’t she?

Quick Break to find some more 4th-grade ideas

We studied Astronomy in 4th grade, so I’m going to dig around in the archives and find some ideas to share with you.

• How to make a writer’s notebook– usable beyond 4th grade, and before it if you put in the right materials
• Holes book club
• Joan of Arc lesson
• Design a planetary landing shuttle
• Legend of the Bluebonnet craft– Texas history is taught in 4th grade, so I put this in 4th, but you could also call it a kindergarten project

Sun unit activity 4: demonstrate a solar eclipse

Oh, wait there was one last activity in our sun unit.  We learned about an eclipse and HAD to, I say HAD TO simulate a solar eclipse. [I may be writing on too much caffeine and sugar right now]

Supplies we used: Inflatable 12In Globe (I got as a freebie from Great Homeschool Conventions) Tennis Ball (we found in the woods on a walk), and a Mini LED Flashlight (I would not use a mini flashlight if you duplicate this, it’s not quite strong enough to truly demonstrate)

However, that mini-flashlight does make it convenient for taking pictures… That and our new black puppet theater for a backdrop.

When you shine the light on the globe it does a great job of displaying how half the world, or in our case with the weak flashlight, one-third of the world is lit up by day, and the rest is in night.  Then our tennis ball moon got to rotate around the earth, and finally we maneuvered for quite a while for the moon to block the sun and create an eclipse.  Of course, the moon was huge in comparison to our Earth, so rather than showing an eclipse covering a small part of the Earth at a time, it covered continents.  Whole continents.  It was rather impressive.

And as a complete and total end to our sun unit, they took a test.  I’m slowly accustoming the kids to taking tests by making them rather low-key for now (especially since Princess freaks out when she doesn’t get everything right).  The tests are open notes, so if they’ve written it down they can use it.  They also know the contents of the test because it’s in their notebook, so they could cheat, but they haven’t figured out to try and do that yet……

I’m sure someday they will give in to that temptation.

Now, what have you done this week?  After anatomy last year astronomy is seeming downright easy, so we’ve completed 2 weeks of materials in 1 week.  It’s a rather refreshing change to our taking almost 3 weeks a chapter to complete.