Wednesday, January 26, 2011

Winter Outdoor Hour Challenge, #3

The light(sun) is facing the small ball which is the earth.  The moon is too small to see. 

To see more Winter Challenges, Click Here

Can you tell what this picture is?  It is not aliens!

It is Joy-Bug and Gracie-Girl doing the experiments on the moon on page 857 of The Handbook of Nature Study.  We learned that no one on the planet ever sees the other side of the moon.  We also learned how the moon rises and sets, and that there are 28 days between moon cycles. 

The moon rises around 8:30pm, but you can not see it until 9:30pm, way after bedtimes.  So, we found a lunar calendar for 2011 and put it into the Nature Journals. 

We also spent time outside looking at the North Star, Big Dipper and Orion.  We were not able to identify the Canis constellations, but they are also in the winter sky.  We got out our indoor planetarium and were able to recognize many more constellations after studying them. 

We do hope to spend more time looking at the night sky, but since we live in an area that gets the equivelant rains of a rain forest (I am NOT kidding), we have lots of clouds.  Think Seattle. 

Remember, Tweet and See posts will be the last day of January.  It is not too late to start a list of all the birds your family hears or sees for the month.  Then you can come over to Kingdom Arrows and hook up on our Mr. Linky.  Click here to read about it.


Heather

4 comments:

  1. We saw the moon this morning around 6:30 AM so if you are up early, you might be able to see it in your neck of the woods.

    Great job and there will be an opportunity to see all those constellations in the sky at some point so keep that in mind.

    Great job! Thanks so much for sharing your link with the OHC.

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  2. Our family studied the moon two years ago and learned a lot. We kept a log of the moon each night for a month, and it was fun to see the different phases recorded.

    Here is a link to a post that I did around that time with some of the fun and helpful things I found. The video was very clear and helped me to see and understand how that we only see one side of the moon.

    http://foothillsvalley.blogspot.com/2008_10_01_archive.html#6913420465480445131

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  3. Looks like your kids had fun. I tried to get pictures of the night sky and they didn't turn out well!

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  4. I like the idea of putting a lunar calendar in your nature journals. I never thought of that!

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