K-12 Outreach Highlights – January 2022
We only had one K-12 outreach event in January 2022. Around the middle of the month, students from Laramie Montessori Charter School in Laramie visited the Science Kitchen to learn about astronomy and the moon. They explored how the moon orbits the earth while the earth orbits the sun using their own bodies to model the moon, earth, and sun. It was a dizzyingly good time! Students also explored how the rotation of the earth gives us a day and the orbit of the earth gives a year, as well as the relative size and distance of the earth-moon-sun system. We also talked about the phases of the moon and the earth and moon’s relative positions during a full, quarter, and new moon.
There are four learning goals for this activity. Students will:
- Understand that Earth rotates around the Sun and the Moon rotates around Earth.
- Understand how a ‘day’ and ‘year’ are related to the orbit and rotation of Earth.
- Have a basic understanding of the relative size of Earth and the Sun.
- Understand how the position of the Sun, Earth, and Moon create the phases of the moon
If you would like to schedule an event with the Science Kitchen, please email: sciencekitchen@uwyo.edu. We do on-campus visits, school visits, grab-n-go kits, and more. We also work with UW to schedule group activities with the UW Planetarium, Geological Museum, Innovation Wyrkshop, 3D CAVE, Coe Makerspace, Williams Conservatory, etc. If you’re interested in this type of visit, please fill out the Admissions survey.