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Lesson and Curriculum
 Lesson
at a Glance:
Curriculum: Project ARIES
Grade: 4-6
Topic: Moon’s distance from Earth
Kathy taught a lesson from Project ARIES, an astronomy-based elementary-level
curriculum that she’s been working with since 1993, when she was
asked to help pilot it with her students. “Project ARIES… gives
the kids a reason to read, and they keep a journal, so they have a reason
to write, so it incorporates a lot of our language arts skills and we
have math right there too, especially with the scale and distance.”
The subject of the lesson was the Moon’s size and its distance from
the Earth. In preparation for the lesson, Kathy had her students
keep Moon journals in which they note the Moon’s shape, its location
in the sky, and its distance from the horizon. She also engaged
her students in informal discussions about the Moon — what did they
know about it, how did they think it worked — and recorded their
ideas.
In the first part of the lesson, the students, working in pairs,
selected two balls or balloons that they felt represented the
relative sizes of the Moon and Earth, and then stood a distance
apart from one
another that they felt represented the relative distance of the
Moon from the Earth. After measuring that distance, the students
took their objects
outside, and Kathy explained how they could measure the angular
size of the Moon with their pinky fingers, which is about half
a degree. Kathy
then had the students who were holding the model Earths stand
against a wall while their partners, who were holding the model
Moons, backed
up until the model Moons appear as half a degree in angular size—that
is, the same size as the real moon. Then, Kathy gave them a chance
to trade the size of their objects, and had them work out how
far away the
Moon was from the Earth in Earth diameters.
After the lesson,
Kathy observed, “In the first model they made,
the Earth and Moon were very close together, and it wasn’t until
they used angular size that they realized, that’s a lot farther
than I thought. That’s a hard concept for them to gather… and
it’s not something you can just tell kids, because they have no
conception those kinds of distances and sizes.”
Kathy wanted her
students to take three things from the lesson: that the distance
to the Moon is farther away than the students
thought it was; that the Moon is one-fourth the size of the
Earth in diameter; and that the Earth is about 30 diameters away from
the Moon.
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