Trip to USD

Oops! Definitely a little behind with updating this blog...

Backtracking to last week, we brought the Bayside kids over to USD to spend the afternoon with Dr. Devine. They had spent time becoming familiar with the details of their individual planets, but the context in which their planets exist had yet to really be touched on. That was the topic of the week.

First Experiment: Solar System Food Scale

We down sized the solar system by approximately 10 billion, making the sun the size of a melon, Jupiter and Saturn the size of a macademia nut, Uranus and Neptune the size of garbanzo beans, and the remainder of the planets the size of sesame seeds. In the picture above, Gadiel is placing a sesame seed Earth on the melon sun to get a sense of how small our planet really is.

Second Experiment: A Walk Through the Solar System

The next was to teach them approximately how long a meter is and use that as our units of distance in our scaled down model of the solar system. We started our planet walk at the IPJ.

We placed the melon sun at the IPJ sign and began our march. 6 meters to Mercury and then all the way out to Neptune, which was a whole 403 m from our starting point. As we made out treck through the orbit of each planet, we would have the kids turn to try and spot Lorenzo who was holding the sun back at the IPJ. Cindy was the most enthusiastic about our space walk, shouting for joy when Grina would read off the number of steps it would take to reach the next planet. Gadiel, on the other hand, was not up for the exercise. I eventually sacrificed my knee and took off running, telling him it would be sad if an injured girl could run faster than him. That got him going!

The group got a little side tracked on the way to Saturn that's to the little echo spot in front of the Immaculata haha!


Since it would have taken us down Linda Vista to reach Pluto, we opted for turning back and ignoring the recently demoted planet. When we got back, Dr. Devine attempt to clarify planetary orbit and rotation and then we called it a day with a celebratory trip to McDonald's.

All-in-all, I think this was a great experience for the kids. I was definitely shocked by how most of them didn't realize that USD was a school, but once some of them realized I was taking classes just like they were, they were full of questions about what college is like. I was a little disappointed in how shy they were about answering Dr. Devine's questions, but I know they remember the material...they've recited it on multiple occassions...it's just a matter of making them feel like they are in an accepting enough environment to try.

Friday 03.05.2010

As Shannen said, Friday was difficult due to the lack of students present. We mostly took the day off from our planned activities, continued on the sunspot project, and played outside with astronomy themed basketball.

On the sunspot project, I think that we have made our point and I am not sure if it is necessary to continue the daily checking on the sunspots for much longer. They aren't doing it on their own, and I actually thought our recap of the first week where we plotted everyday on the whiteboard was rather successful. Maybe we can finish up with the day that we study the sun and stars?

Asteroid Strike Basketball

So, this week at Bayside was a little difficult. Only two our kids were there...so we had to quickly rethink our plan for the day. I think it's become clear to all three of us that our daily sunspot project is not something they plan to do on their own everyday and that's fine. We've just been taking some time at the beginning of each week and having them record all of the data they missed. Thankfully that website keeps an archive!!

David and Gadiel were much more entertained by the stickers we bought them to decorate their folders than anything we planned to talk about, so we kept it simple. Our goal was to get them to think about planetary rotation, so we brought them outside to the basketball court. Lorenzo grabbed a basketball and acting as the Earth, orbiting around me - the sun - by following the painted circle at the top of the key. David actually came up with the fact that Earth must spin as it orbits in order for us to have night and day. We also brought up the belief that the earthquake in Chile has tilted our axis more...I'm not too sure that caught on, though.

Their attention spans died pretty quick, so we turned our science lesson into an asteroid strike with a basketball. We all took turns trying to hit the Earth with asteroids. David was constantly asking me what planet we could try to hit next.

You know, they might not have learned too much concrete science this week, but they had fun and that's important.

A Bayside Initiative

In an effort to extend the reach of science in the afterschool environment, the USD Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry has teamed up with the Bayside Community Center in Linda Vista. Under the direction of Dr. Peter Iovine, students enrolled in CHEM 494 have the unique opportunity to engage the Bayside kids in a variety of science activities they have designed on their own with the intent of introducing science in an approachable and fun way to each child.

This blog has been created to act as a log of the astronomy project "A Walk Through the Solar System" designed by Alyssa, Lorenzo, and myself. We travel to Bayside every Friday and spend an hour with the six 4th - 6th graders in attendance, engaging them in the wonder of space. Our goal: To interest young minds not only in the world we live in, but the worlds around us, and to put into perspective our minute place in this vast universe.

Here, the three of us will share our reflections throughout the various weeks of our project...

We live in a changing universe, and few things are changing faster than our conception of it.

- Timothy Ferris, "The Whole Shebang"