Starlight, Star bright…

Starlight, star bright, first star I see…today??

While we can’t see most stars during the daytime, Grandpa Sun has been teaching us all about the sun, and it turns out the sun is actually a star too! Just like the nighttime stars, it is made of gas and emits enormous amounts of energy! Our own sun is not the biggest star out there, it just looks so big because it’s the closest star to earth. Well, it’s still pretty big, because more than one million earths could fit inside the sun. WOW!!!

With the help of Grandpa Sun, our own artistic creations, and a trip to UBC’s Pacific Museum of the Earth, we’ve been learning a lot of cool (or should I say hot..) things about the sun.

After the kids told me what they already know about the sun, and what they are curious to learn, we began watching videos about the sun, reading about the sun, asking Grandpa Sun questions, and also making our own paper mache suns. Check out our sun solar system on display at Buddings!

The suns have different colours, lighter and darker, because some parts of the sun are hotter and some are cooler. The sun has large sun spots, which look darker and are significantly cooler than other parts of the sun. The sun also emits solar flares, little firework-like explosions, which we represented with tissue paper and pipe cleaners. After learning a bit about what the sun, I thought it was time to expand our perspective.

So off we went to the Pacific Museum of the Earth at UBC to check out the OMNIGLOBE.

While we couldn’t get the omniglobe to work initially, we found some help and pretty soon we were amazed by the enormous globe that could be transformed from the earth, to Jupiter, to Mars, to the sun!

When we transformed the omniglobe into the sun, we got to see its sun spots and solar flares in action. It was glowing and bursting and exploding in front of our eyes! With all that constant energy coming to the earth from the sun, we sure are lucky that we’re positioned right where we are. Any closer and things on the planet would be too hot! Any further away and we’d be shivering in our boots.

Now that we’ve been on a bit of a space odyssey, we’re going to bring things a little closer to home. The next few weeks we’ll be looking at the sun’s affect on the earth–how it sustains all living things! Next week the grow light is coming out and we are going to get dirty planting seeds. We’ll get to see firsthand how solar energy is transformed into living organisms.

Stay tuned as our sunny adventures take root!