After the tornado warning expired, Bobby and I resumed working on his nebula poster. We both thought a bit more material would be nice, so we picked one more star-forming, one more planetary, and one more reflection nebula. We found an excellent image that showed the color-coding used for the different elements present in nebulae, so I explained to Bobby how astronomers use filters to track the distribution of the elements in these gas clouds. While in the computer lab, we had to move to another computer for printing purposes, and Bobby's friend sat at the one we had originally been using. The friend was checking out the nebula images, and pointed to one that we had studied, and Bobby explained very professionally and accurately what that nebula was: NGC 1999 in Orion - I was very proud of him!

We continued working on Bobby's nebula poster. We organized the images that he already has into the three main types of nebulae (star-forming, planetary, reflection) and placed them on the poster background. Bobby asked to print one more image of each category, which we did, and we planned the text that we will add to the images.

We continued last week's project with Gwendolyn by completing the glittering of the stars of the Big Dipper. We also glued the photo of the constellation onto black paper in preparation of completing the mobile, and added the names of the stars. Since this is a scaled-down model (obviously) we need to convert the real distance in lightyears to something more manageable such as centimeters or inches. I explained to Gwendolyn that since distances in space are so vast, it is convenient to express these distances as lightyears, i.e. the distance light travels in one year. We calculated this together from a starting point of 186,000 miles per second, and ended up with a very large number indeed. The stars in the Big Dipper lie between some 78 to 123 or so lightyears away. Gwendolyn is very fast with mental arithmetic, it was fun to do this exercise with her!

We continued working on the nebula poster by printing out images of the three main types of nebulae (star-forming, planetary, reflection). I took the opportunity to instruct Bobby further on the main differences between them, and outlined their primary characteristics.

I decided it was time for Bobby to understand better these nebulae that he finds so fascinating! So today we worked on collecting images of the three main types of nebulae: star-forming, planetary, and reflection. The first type are stellar nurseries (stars are born in massive clouds of gas and dust), the second type are the end stages of the red giant phase of stars (they have nothing to do with planets, but the historically inaccurate name has stuck), and the third type are clouds of gas and dust that reflect the light of bright nearby stars. The next step is to collate all this information into poster format.

Tuesday, January 5, 2016
9:00- 9:15; 15 min.
Science enrichment:
Elements -
Ben and I talked a bit about his holiday. We also examined his periodic table and I told him about the new elements that were just announced this week -115 ununpentium,117 ununseptium, and 118 ununoctium. This fills the bottom row of the periodic table.

Tuesday, January 5, 2016
1:30- 1:45; 15 min.
Science enrichment:
Force experiment-
Ben walked and ran a timed trial on the force experiment track. His times will be added to a school-wide exercise to show how to measure time, and speed.

Wednesday, January 6, 2016
9:00-10:00; 60 min.
Science enrichment -
Snap to electronics -
Ben had his snap-to electronics project on his desk, so we decided to explore the movement of force. After examining the project book, we decided to make a ‘laser gun sound effects machine’. Ben followed the directions while I explained how the energy moves from the battery through the electronic bits. The sound effects made Ben happy, and he wanted to use the machine to enforce his star wars imagination story. I brought out the lab snap to electronics, and we made a motion sensor star wars sound machine. This also provided an opportunity to show how energy moves. We discussed how energy flows through the human body in much the same way. Ben told me his Star Wars story, and how the sound effects played into his narrative.

Ethan and I spoke about sports, and analyzed sports videos.

It was so nice to see Gwendolyn again after the holidays! We dove straight back into constellations, but now I wanted to emphasize that just like our 2-D photographs don't give a true picture of our 3-D world, our imagined 2-D constellations are really projections of very disparate objects that are, in fact, quite far apart in space. We started our project by cutting out stars of different sizes so they correspond, roughly, to the stars in The Big Dipper (a constellation Gwendolyn is beginning to be very familiar with), and covering them in glitter. We will continue next week, and hopefully begin to construct our 3-D model.