Comparing Earth
This week, we worked on comparing our planet, the Earth with the 3 other terrestrial planets: Mercury, Venus and Mars.
A LOT of facts that we helped the girls to reason and not rush through: distance of the planets from the Earth:
- Mercury 0.4 AU (37,182,320 miles)
- Venus 0.7 AU (65,069,070 miles)
- Earth 1 AU
- Mars 1.5 AU (139,433,700 miles)
1 AU (Astronomical Unit) = 92,955,810 miles
The astronomical unit is a unit of length, roughly the distance from Earth to the Sun. However, that distance varies as Earth orbits the Sun, from a maximum (aphelion) to a minimum (perihelion) and back again once a year. Originally conceived as the average of Earth's aphelion and perihelion, it is now defined as exactly 149597870700 metres (about 150 million kilometres, or 93 million miles). Text was cited from the Wikipedia.
It was fascinating to observe the girls think about gravity's effect on their weight should they be on different planets! A lot of questions came up and we discussed a number of different concepts:
- density
- gravity
- rotation
- a solar day, etc
We also looked at the composition of the atmosphere on Earth, Venus and Mars. The girls worked with dry ice to better understand the properties of CO². Their minds really got going, becoming very creative in their analytical thinking. We loved seeing their curiosity and engagement today.
We think we can help them channel their desire to learn and explore, teach them the difference between a relevant question, which tends to deepen the understanding of a topic, and remote association, which usually destructs. With this in mind, we will develop and prepare materials that will allow them to make the shift towards pondering rather than resorting to quick cognitive associative reactions.
Next time, we will focus on an exciting activity, developing a habitable planet.
Kate will do a quick review of what we covered this week before new concept will be introduced.
Questions to ask after todays session:
Why does Mercury have such a large change in temperature throughout it's very long day?
Why does Venus have such a hot temperature?
Why doesn't Mars have an atmosphere anymore?
— Kate and Joanna