North Michigan News

Besser Museum Session 1: The Sun

Students will learn about the sun and stars. Core ideas will be learning about our sun being a star, and how stars differ from planets. The planetarium show will focus on highlighting this information and will be enhanced with the movie sunstruck. The take home activity will be a sun viewing box, made from a cardboard box, some aluminum foil, and a white sheet of paper. Students will also make a sun bead bracelet, which glow or change colors when introduced to UV from the sun.

https://docs.google.com/.../1FAIpQLSfn7rUsWjU4qd.../viewform

Besser Museum Session 2: Fossils & Dinosaurs

Students will learn about the geological history of Earth and how much has changed since our planet was first created. This talk will focus on meteorites and dinosaurs, and the planetarium show will center around DAARKTD. For the activity, students will visit the museum’s fossil park and learn about the Devonian period and keep all the fossil they find. Students will also receive a Fossil Guide & Journal for Northern Michigan. Students will also learn about hunting for meteorites.

https://docs.google.com/.../1FAIpQLSf51MGraqZvHH.../viewform

Besser Museum Session 3: Telescopes & Observations

Students will learn about telescopes and how they work, as well as some history about them and how they’ve changed the astronomical world forever. The planetarium show will focus on teaching some of these concepts, enhancing the experience with the movie Two Small Pieces of Glass. The activity for this event would be to create your own telescope, and the take home activity will involve finding certain targets in the sky using their star charts and observing them with their new telescope. Students will receive the telescope kit and a star chart.

https://docs.google.com/.../1FAIpQLSdSB9FOejlhYO.../viewform

Besser Museum Session 4: The Planets

This lesson will center around understanding the planets of our solar system and how they are alike and different from each other. The planetarium show will focus on discussing the different planets and showing the video The Birth of Planet Earth. The in-house activity will be showing the distances between planets, using a scale model solar system. The take home activity will be observing Venus’s phases and Jupiter’s Galilean moons, by looking through a telescope or binoculars, and drawing their observations within a provided sketchbook.

https://docs.google.com/.../1FAIpQLSelwqvpqHbVc7.../viewform

Original source can be found here.