Age：4.75 & 7.75
Presentation: Solar Systems
Looking over my May pics, I realized I did not document what we did with our solar system study. I wish we’d gone further with our study, but it would have to do for now.
We first started with the kids randomly cutting up some solar system cards I had made. Seeing an opportunity, I suggested that Thumper and Astroboy glue them onto a large sheet of paper. For Thumper I also had her find the names in English and write them down. Astroboy never finished his. If you look carefully you will notice that the labels are actually wrong.
So a week or 2 later, I finally finish my solar system nomenclature cards. We spent about an hour on this one day. First we laid the picture+label card out in order for Astroboy to match. While he did that, Thumper read through the definitions and tried to match them. Afterward, I read through them with Astroboy. We spent some time acting out the cards. One planet spinned very fast around the sun (Astroboy ran around me really fast) and one rotated really slowly. We then used the definition cards that had blanks for the planet names and tried to figure out what planet that was.
Honestly, I don’t think either kid remember these definitions a month after we did it. I know we need some more follow ups. Like making a booklet for Astroboy and maybe a research project for Thumper. But we haven’t followed up.
I also found some mistakes in my cards so I need to remake them. The definition cards seemed kind of boring to me and the language a bit too advanced maybe. So I need to redo them a bit.
Chinese
In Chinese, the planets are named after the 5 elements: gold, wood, water, fire, earth 金木水火土, plus sky and ocean （天王, 海王）. I thought maybe they’d name the planets in the same order. But alas, they do not. I’m telling Thumper: 金木水火土天海. Google says 金木水火土 is called 五行, and the planets are called 行星. See how these two terms are related in Chinese? Kind of interesting. And Uranus and Neptune are directly translatable to English as Uranus is named after the God of Sky and Neptune we know is the God of Sea. Anyways, here are some nomenclatures for planets
- 太陽 – Sun
- 水星 – Mercury
- 金星 – Venus
- 地球 – Earth
- 月球 – Moon
- 火星 – Mars
- 木星 – Jupiter
- 土星 – Saturn
- 天王星 – Uranus
- 海王星 – Neptune
- 公轉 – revolve (around the sun)
- 自轉 – Rotate (spin on itself)
- 一周 － One revolution
Notice that we say moon is 月球 instead of 月亮. 月球 is the more scientific term.
In making my nomenclature cards, I found out these planets had other names in Ancient times, so I included those in. You can get really into this whole planet thing from a Chinese point of view, which is distinctly different from our Roman/Greek naming of planets.
