Chapter 5 Stars and Galaxies Introduction

Materials:

• Worksheets: Front Word Scramble: Back Word Find
• blank sheet of paper and a pen or pencil

Objective:

• Students will be introduced to Chapter 5.
• Students will identify what their goals are for the chapter.
• Students will describe how the chapter is organized.

Anticipatory Set:* Students will be given a picture of the night sky.(from Page 106) Students will then compare and contrast the picture of the night sky on page 106 with a memory of what the night sky looks like. Here is how?

Look at this picture,(106) How is like what your used to seeing in the night sky, how is it unlike what you are used to seeing in the night sky.

A student from each site will read their response.

Teacher Input:*The teacher will show a picture of the sun. Even though the sun looks bright it is just an average star. In fact the sun is just one of a billion stars in our galaxy. Explain billion using this.

Picture 1, Here is a little box, a cubic millimeter.
A thousand is written as 1,000 or 10^3. If you start counting the seconds it will take about 17 minutes to get to a thousand.
There are a thousand small boxes in the blue box.

Picture 2, Million
A million is a thousand times bigger (written as 1,000,000 or 10^6). It will take you about 12 days to count a million seconds. There are a million little boxes in the pink box

Picture 3, Billion A billion is a thousand times bigger than a million. It is written as 1,000,000,000 or 10^9.
It will take you about 31.5 years to count a billion seconds. There are a billion little boxes in the big green box

Look at this galaxy. So there are about a billion stars making up this galaxy.

Beyond our galaxy there are millions of other galaxies. Each with billions of stars. In other words. There are more stars than you could possibly image most of which have there own solar systems.

Show the students the Organize your thoughts diagram on Page 107. Have a student explain what it is showing.

Show the students the Goals for learning in this chapter and explain them.

Guided Practice:* Students will begin watching part two of the astronomy video on the universe.

Independent Practice:* Students will complete the worksheet, Local Opportunities to Study Stars.

Check for Understanding:* None on introduction.

Duration:

30 minutes + 10-15 for Independent Practice (Could be longer if taken for homework).

Alaska Content Standards Addressed in this lesson: