Memory of Mercury

We just finished our unit on Mercury today and what fun we've had. We are using Exploring Creation with Astronomy from Apologia science. I must say that I'm very anti-textbook. It's just not the way I want my children to learn information. Yet this has some very Charlotte Mason additions in it and it's written from a Christian perspective. That's a big selling point with me, especially when it comes to astronomy. Rarely will we find school books for our children that teach from a young earth perspective or a God created perspective for that matter. We're loving Apologia's astronomy!

How is it CM? Well, the lessons are broken up into different parts. You can read one part a day or a few parts, it's up to you. Occassionally the writer, Jeanie Fulbright, will ask for the child to summarize what they've learned thus far or tell a story using some of the information learned. There are project to complete such as illustrating the different planets and writing all of the facts the child can remember. I was so impressed with Tink's narration/composition today. She wrote so many facts- it was basically her first report! Here's what she said:

Mercury

Mercury does not have an atmosphere. So rocks from the atmosphere fall into Mercury. Unlike our planet, Mercury travels around the sun in an oval. Mercury is very small. In Mercury, 59 days in our planet is 1 day in Mercury. 88 days in our planet is 1 year in Mercury. Mercury's surface is filled with rocks.

Now I must say that all I did was ask her to write down what she remembered from our two week study. She also drew a beautiful picture of Mercury revolving around the sun. She even drew the sun with sun flares (which we learned about from the sun unit). Needless to say, I was quite pleased. And again, we were able to use her report to work on handwriting, spelling, sentence structure, and language arts in general.

The picture above is of a project that was suggested in the end of the unit. We were talking about the fact that Mercury does not have an atmosphere therefore astroids are always falling into it. We went out and chose a few small pebbles. I filled a bowl with flour and we dropped the pebbles into the flour to show how the surface of Mercury looks. Of course, Tink added that Mercury is a gaseous planet and we could not actually stand on it if we were there. See, she's learning a lot! Mom didn't even remember that one! Now, onto Venus!

Jill