Monthly Archives: November 2010

Solar System kids’ Arts and Crafts which are out of this world!

The nation has been gripped by BBC2′s recent Wonders Of The Solar System series.

Kids also feel a sense of wonder when learning about the stars and far-away Planets twinkling and revolving in the night sky.

Companies like Baker Ross have all the http://www.bakerross.co.uk/category-Solar-System-Crafts-CURRSOLA.htm”>Arts and Craft supplies to help budding Patrick Moores and junior Brian Coxes build their own private universes in the classroom or at home.

A Make-Your-Own Solar System kit will let kids assemble polystyrene planets around a polystyrene sun. Acrylic paint and magic marbling ink means that children can use their knowledge to colour in the planets correctly. Will they go for fiery orange for Venus? (They’ll have to find out a little About The Planets before they start colouring.)

Giant Honeycomb 3D Stars & Planets are just as eye-catching. These giant star and Planet-shaped card cut-outs have a bright 3D honeycomb centre at their core. They are great to decorate and hang up as they come with coloured ribbons – perfect for livening up classroom and home ‘atmospheres’.

Planetary displays and collage can be brightened up and personalised even more with Galaxy Foam Stickers; self-adhesive foam rockets, planets and stars. Arts and Crafts ‘star’ pupils can really get busy with these as there are 200 stickers in each pack!

Arts and Crafts activities can take-off with the help of some Make-Your-Own 3D Foam Rockets; the templates provided are easy to make and will look so colourful when completed.

Baker Ross also stocks other planet-related items which serve as great learning aids before or after completing arts and crafts activities. An Inflatable Solar System Set contains planets which are all in proportion to each other; great for picturing the relative sizes of planets compared to humble Mother Earth.

Teachers or parents can also use these mini-planets to demonstrate how the real ones revolve and travel around the sun. An activity booklet can inspire children to find out even more about how Earth is not the only planet.

A Solar System Foam Bookmark Kit is just perfect if kids want to keep their place while reading the activity booklet; there are three designs in each kit for kids to choose from before they start making them.

If your young ones want to read more About The Solar System, then do bear in mind that the website About.com has a list of Top 10 Astronomy Books for Kids (http://bit.ly/it8SqN).

The solar system really is an inspiring subject for kids to find out about.
Below is a short list of five Facts About The Solar System that I didn’t know before today!

1. Pluto isn’t one of the major planets; it is just a ‘dwarf’ planet along with Ceres, Eris, Haumea and the interestingly-named Makemake (‘christened’ after a Polynesian God).
2. Uranus is often referred to as the ‘sideways planet’ due to the way it is tilted on its axis so much.
3. Mercury is mostly obscured by the glare of the Sun and can usually only be seen by eagle-eyed astronomers in the morning or evening twilight.
4. Mars is red because of the iron oxide (rust) in its rocks and dust.
5. Venus will probably never be fit for humans to live on as it has an average temperature hot enough to melt lead or zinc and stinks of sulphur.

 

About the Author

James has been a journalist for four years.

PapaGG sings “Days and Planets” for children

Planets $5.47 “Photographs and simple text introduce the planets in our solar system”–Provided by publisher.

The Planets $2.99 With her blockbuster New York Times bestsellers Longitude and Galileo’s Daughter, Dava Sobel used her rare and luminous gift for weaving difficult scientific concepts into a compelling story to garner rave reviews and attract readers from across the literary spectrum. Now, in The Planets, Sobel brings her full talents to bear on what is perhaps her most ambitious subject to date – the planets of our solar system. The sun’s family of planets become a familiar place in this personal account of the lives of other worlds. Sobel explores the planets’ origins and oddities through the lens of popular culture, from astrology, mythology, and science fiction to art, music, poetry, biography, and history. A perfect gift and a captivating journey, The Planets is a gorgeous study of our place in the universe that will mesmerize everyone who has ever gazed with awe at our night sky.

The Planets of Our Solar System $20.79 “Describes the eight planets in our solar system, including the birth of the solar system and the planets’ orbits around the Sun”–Provided by publisher.

The Planets in Our Solar System $5.51 Part of the Let’s-Read-and-Find-Out series, this second stage book is a clear, simple introduction to the planets of our solar system and their individual characteristics. An African-American teacher leads readers on an odyssey of learning, taking them th

Love and Other Planets $11.18 Adem’s heralded Homesongs was a paean to hearth and homestead, and it succeeded in spades by turning the intensely personal into the universal: home as harbor in an anthropological sense, the glue that binds everyone together at the same time it affords us our most intimate moments. On Love and Other Planets, Adem turns the telescope on its end, equating the far reaches of our universe with the space that exists in the closest of quarters — between lovers, between friends, between our own perceptions and reality. It’s another intriguing angle from which to launch a concept record, though Adem’s intimate, stand-alone portraits certainly belie any prog-ish stereotypes — The Wall this ain’t. But Adem does make more liberal use of the cut-and-paste studio aesthetic that defined the post-rock experiments of Fridge (where he played bass), adding more textural dimensions to Love and Other Planets without sacrificing the organic acoustics of Homesongs. It’s a more balanced hybrid where the electronic and acoustic meld with seamless beauty, wheezing harmoniums bleeding into textured synths, autoharps, glockenspiel, and clarion-toned acoustic guitars thrown into relief by processed samples. Percussive elements that were Fridge’s bread and butter are also more central characters here. Songs like “Launch Yourself” and “You and Moon” swirl and crackle with synth washes and handclap percussion sculpted into rich backbeats. “These Lights Are Meaningful” and “Something’s Going to Come” feature drums up front in the mix, adding an uptempo rock feel — albeit acoustic-based — to Adem’s folkish inclinations. A pair of lonely laments conjuring the vastness of space, “Crashlander” is a “Space Oddity”-like tale rendered in gentle Radiohead ballad style and “Last Transmission from the Lost Mission” is accented with disembodied chimes and melodica floating past like icy space debris. But any suggestions of existential isolation are disarmed by the sonic warmth of the songs and production, and by the genuine humanism in Adem’s lyrics. Disc opener “Warning Call,” with its luscious fingerpicked patterns and ringing glock, is a plea for environmental sensitivity on a personal and global scale. The solo guitar piece “Spirals” finds Adem’s ruminative and rickety voice — think Richard Hawley in a higher register without the reverb — contrasting the universe outside with our own inner worlds, where emotions result in “tectonic shifts” of the heart every bit as profound as the stars’ splendor. With Love and Other Planets, Adem has made a fitting companion for Homesongs, a record cut from similar thematic cloth but painted with an expanded musical palette. And like Homesongs, this record reveals more with each listen, burrowing its way into your consciousness and becoming a welcome part of your musical DNA. ~ John Schacht, Rovi Performers: Emma Macfarlane – Vocals (Background);

Stars & Planets $10.39 From our own solar system’s neighbors to the mysteries of deep space, an addition to a fact-filled series explores the planets and stars of our galaxy and beyond.

Giant Planets of Our Solar System $169 Reviews the state of knowledge of the atmospheres of the giant gaseous planets: Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune. This work reviews the theories of their formation and contrasts their observed temperature, composition and cloud structures and compares with simple thermodynamic, radiative transfer and dynamical models.

The Outer Planets $31.7 As our ability to observe space improves with ever-progressing technology, we better grasp the farthest reaches of the cosmos and heighten our understanding of the universe in its entirety. Spacecraft exploration of the outermost planets in our solar system—Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune—reveals many features of these seemingly harsh environments and moves us closer to comprehending the origins of our own planet as well as others. This insightful volume examines the characteristics of these remote planets and the paths they illuminate in our quest for celestial knowledge.

3-D Planets $7.98 Give your solar scene new dimension! This set features the nine planets of our solar system. All of these colorful, glow-in-the-dark orbs are ready to give your room a big bang. String them to your ceiling and learn more about the worlds beyond our own. Comes with nine glowing planets, 25 feet of string and adhesive putty.

The Inner Planets $31.7 Despite their proximity to Earth, much remains to be learned about the origins and conditions of Mercury, Venus, and Mars. The three smallest planets in our solar system and the three closest to the Sun—Mercury, Venus, and Mars—differ greatly from each other and from the place we call home. This far-reaching volume travels to each of the inner planets in turn and details the physical characteristics as well as the exploration efforts made in order to learn more about our closest planetary neighbors.

Lonely Planets $10.09 It’s been nearly four decades since Carl Sagan first addressed the general public from a scientist’s perspective confronting the possibility of extraterrestrial life. We’ve learned a lot in those years and planetary scientist David Grinspoon is well prepared to explore this field with a new generation of readers. In Lonely Planets Grinspoon investigates the big questions: How widespread are life and intelligence in the cosmos? Is life on Earth an accident or in some sense the "purpose" of this universe? And how can we working from the Earth-centric definition of "life " even begin to think about the varieties of life-forms on other planets? In accessible lively prose and using the topic of extraterrestrial life as a mirror with which to view human beliefs evolution history and aspirations Grinspoon takes readers on a three-part journey. History is an overview of our expanding awareness of other planets from the observations of seventeenth-century natural philosophers to modern-day space exploration. It traces the history of our ideas on alien life to the earliest days of astronomy and shows how these beliefs have changed with humanity’s evolving self-image. Science tells the story of cosmic evolution and the evolution of life on Earth. Here Grinspoon disputes the recent "Rare Earth hypothesis " which argues that Earth is unique for sprouting advanced life-forms maintaining instead that life is likely to be well adapted to a wide variety of planets. He questions conventional assumptions of what is required for a planet to come to life scrutinizing current ideas and evidence for life on Mars Venus and the moons of Jupiter and challenging readers to think about other life-forms that may exist on other worlds. Belief discusses the limits of our abilities to conceptualize or communicate with intelligent aliens living on planets circling distant stars. Grinspoon speculates on what intelligent life might become eventually on Earth and elsewhere and the implications both scientific and philosophical of these far-future evolutionary possibilities. Written with authority and edge and rich in personal often amusing anecdotes Lonely Planets explores the shifting boundary between planetary science and naturalphilosophy and reveals how the search for extraterrestrial life unites our spiritual and scientific quests for connection with the cosmos.

EVAN-MOOR EMC853 EXPLORING SPACE-GR. 1-3 SCIENCEWORKS FOR KIDS $16.5 For hands-on activities involving the sun, moon, planets and stars that connect science with real life, choose Exploring Space. This book, designed with good science and easy teaching in mind, covers these concepts: Earth is part of a solar system in the Milky Way galaxy, stars are huge balls of hot, glowing gases, our sun is a star, groups of stars seen together are called constellations, each planet in our solar system has unique characteristics. the Earth has one satellite called the moon.the Earth’s movements through space cause day and night and the seasons. Scientists study space in many ways. Activities help children practice skills in: observation, analysis, communication, making comparisons, prediction, critical thinking, and recording. Areas of study address major themes such as: change, structure, function, diversity, and cause and effect. Samples of the hands-on learning experiences: cut out the planets and put them in order, explore eclipses, day & night, and seasons using a globe and a lamp, make a phases-of-the-moon wheel , make a star box to show constellations, observe the moon for a moon and fill in a moon calenda. Contains many reproducible, ready-to-go resources, such as record sheets, logbook forms, minibooks, and picture cards. Illustrated throughout with fun, helpful line art. All 80 pages perforated for easy removal.

Janice Vancleave’s Solar System $10.95 Now, kids can explore the wonders of our solar system as they discover what comets are made of, how much they weigh on Mercury, and how the Moon can eclipse the Sun. This latest title from Janice VanCleave uses her popular format to teach kids about the science of the solar system, while providing many ideas for successful science fair projects. Fascinating activities teach children about the many amazing components of our solar system, including the Sun, Moon, planets, comets, and meteorites. Over twenty experiments, projects, and activities cover planetary orbits and atmospheres, sunspots, meteor showers, and much more.

Our Solar System: An easy, practical book to understand the planets in our Solar System. Written especially for kids to learn about science and Nature $9.99 Our Solar System: An easy, practical book to understand the planets in our Solar System.Written especially for kids to learn about science and nature.

Wedgits Explorer Pak $104.26 Move over man-in-the-moon; child explorers spend endless hours creating their adventurous designs for WEDGiTS eXploration vehicles. Your child will amaze you with stories from their space travel adventures and landing on distant planets. This 125-piece set of WEDGiTS offers a futuristic dimension in creative, geometric linking. With the eXplorer Pak of WEDGiTS, kids can build designs that look like they should fly beyond our solar system, land on distant planets, and most importantly, they can explore the outer-reaches of their imagination. Included in the retail package is a hands-on instruction guide that offers Wedging Tips & Techniques, and step-by-step instructions on How to Build the X-Orbiter. Numerous other design structures are pictured on the high-gloss, instruction booklet. A unique feature, to the eXplorer product, is the use of glow-in-the-dark material in all of the octahedral parts. Kids get the actual sensation of the full moon’s luminescent glow on their WEDGiTS creation when they turn off the lights. WEDGiTS. Build your mind.

What If: Mind-Boggling Science Questions for Kids $14.95 What if the earth were square? Discover the amazing answers to some cooland weird questions about our worldWhat if the earth stopped spinning?What if we could see sounds? What if the moon fell down?What if aliens landed and only wanted to talk to dogs? Bizarre brainteasers and ingenious inquiries set the stage for a fantastic foray into the wacky world of real science. The intriguing topics range from plants and animals to light and sound, from the wind and the weather to the planets and the stars. Captivating cartoons and quick, fun-filled experiments will stretch your mind and your imagination.