I’m doing an astronomy presentation for very young kids at a school soon. The kids are in grades K-2, which makes them 5-8 years old. There are going to be about 150 kids in the audience, plus teachers. It’s a 30 minute presentation, with the basic format being a slideshow. I’ve got most of that planned.
What I really need is ideas for audience participation. I want to be able to bring some kids up from the audience and do something to help demonstrate a concept in astronomy.
No ideas too foolish! Something involving funny hats or rubber chickens would be about right. Oh, and no really fancy equipment or chemicals.
I’m thinking that having the kids “act out” the solar system might work. One can be the sun, others can be the planets, one can be the earth’s moon, etc. They’ll need to rotate and revolve “in scale”, according to your directions. Distances and diameters will probably not be to scale (you can explain why).
Dunno if you’re talking about the moon at all, but I always had difficulty with the idea that the moon keeps the same face towards the Earth, meaning that it rotates once (turns on its axis, its “day”) for each revolution (trip around the Earth, its orbit). I couldn’t get my mind around how that worked, until I completed this thought experiment:
Take two children: one’s the Earth, the other’s the Moon. Have the Moon orbit the earth, always keeping her face to the Earth. Stop them every ninety degrees. At 90 degrees, the Moon’s made a quarter turn from her original location. At 180 degrees, she’s now made a half turn from her original location - if a ghost Moon was still standing in her original location (and the Earth wasn’t in the way), she’d be looking at herself. And so it goes, so that by the time the Moon returns to her original location, she’s also turned completely around once.
Sadly, this only uses two children. Hmmm…
Maybe constellations? You could grab seven kids from the audience, place them into the dipper formation, then ask kids what they see. When they (hopefully) answer “The Big Dipper!”, you can say that that “constellation” is actually known to scientists as Ursa Major, the big bear. However, as skies get brighter due to light pollution (and as we’re less whacked out on whatever it was the guy who actually saw the bear was taking!), the dimmer stars are less visible, so we rename the constellation after the brighter stars we see. You could then use kids to teach them how to recognize Casseopia, Orion, Sagitarius (the teacup!) or other landmarks like the summer triangle or winter great circle. If you had enough time, you could teach about the pointer stars in the big dipper using kids, having them point to the North Star or “follow the arc to Arcturus” and “speed on to Spica.” And constellations are good things, as kids will go home and point them out to their parents at night, and parents will be impressed (at least mine were).
One demonstration I remember from high school that was pretty neat. If you can find a small platform that allows a student to stand on it and be spun in a circle. The student holds 5 pound weights in his hands, you spin him slowly while they have the weights held out at about a 45 to 60 degree angle from their body. After you have them rotating at a slow speed, tell them to slowly let the weights drop until they are holding them against their side. The person on the platform spins faster the closer the weights are to their body. I think this demonstrates conservation of angular momentum?
I like the idea of having kids act out the solar system. Maybe you could use that to show the difference between the geocentric Ptolemaic model and the actual heliocentric structure?
It would help knowing what sort of topics you’re trying to cover. I work in a planetarium, and when I do live shows for the little ones, we’ll talk about the variety of things you can see in the sky - first during the day, and then at night. Daytime objects include clouds and the Sun, but also birds and airplanes - no those aren’t all things in space, but we’re encouraging them to think about what they see when they look up.
When we look at the clouds, we encourage them to imagine what sort of shapes are in the clouds. One of them looks a lot like a dinosaur, to give them a little help. This gets them used to the idea that you can use your imagination to see shapes in things. It prepares them for looking at constellations later. (Though I’ve heard many times that kids under 3rd grade really can’t get the concept of constellations - it’s too abstract for them.)
I like to tell young kids that constellations are like doing dot-to-dot puzzles, except that there aren’t any numbers by the dots. So you can connect them any way you choose. It doesn’t HAVE to be a Dipper. It can be a bear, or a crocodile, a hippo, a drinking gourd, a wagon, or a walrus named Bob.
The reasons for day and night is another big concept. You’d be amazed how many kids this age think that the Moon makes it night.