planetary Motion (Week 9)

manna moment

Hold your thumb arm’s length away.  Close one eye and use your thumb to cover, or block a larger object from your view. This might be a plant across the room or a clock on the wall. How could your relatively smaller thumb be the same size as the larger object further away? The closer your thumb is to your eye, the larger it appears compared to the actually larger object at a distance. This is why the Lord calls us to walk by faith and not by sight. Our default is to look at our circumstances from our own limited perspective.  Things–even small things–close to us will seem much bigger than they are in respect to our Almighty God.  I praise the Lord for His thoughts are not ours and His ways are not ours. Moreover, Praise God He invites us to share in His perspective. The Apostle Paul encourages us to set our minds on things above and not on things on Earth.  Let us choose higher thoughts, His thoughts. (Colossians 3:2)

Planet presentations

Today began the planet presentations for the students.  Each student chose a planet to research and find out specific facts about it.  This rubric lists all the information that I wanted them to find on their specific planet.  They were to prepare a poster board presentation for us.  The facts that they gathered, I am hoping to use in a Planet Trivia Game next week.  This will encourage great listening skills and know that their work is valuable.  There does need to be some tweaking of the information to be sure the measurements are in the same units.

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Planetary Motion 

On March 20, 2023 at 4:24pm Central time, the vernal equinox took place.  In our notes, we learned about solstices and equinoxes.  The Vernal Equinox is the point where we are exactly halfway between the shortest day in winter (winter solstice) and the longest day in summer (summer solstice).  At this specific time there was an equal amount of sunlight for daytime and shadow for nighttime on the Earth.
In these notes we also covered the difference between solar and lunar eclipses and demonstrated these in class with a flashlight, inflatable globe and a styrofoam ball connected to a bamboo skewer.

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