Astronomy, Home School Style

The subject I am having the most fun teaching this year is Seleia's science.  Astronomy!!  She is having as much fun learning it as I am teaching it, too!  She can tell you off the top of her head that aster is Latin for "star" and onomy means "knowledge of".  Right now we are studying the planets in our solar system. (I love that her book still includes Pluto, talks about why it is no longer "official" and tells the student to gather all of the information and then "you decide" if Pluto should be a planet.  Go, Pluto!) In order to help learn more about the individual planets and their order, we had Seleia paint them!  (She asked permission to give the sun sunspots.  I love it!) We pulled each planet up online and learned a few facts about it, then got a great image of that planet and left it up on the screen while she did her best to make her versions look realistic.  (She did an amazing job on Jupiter and Neptune!!)  Then we went to www.kidsastronomy.com while the paint dried and watched a model of the rotation of the planets around the sun and learned a little bit more!  After everything was dry we hung it above the bookshelves in the schoolroom for everyday memory use.  (Not to mention, it looks cool!)