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Jupiter science lesson

May 6, 2015 Ticia 8 Comments

A few months ago in one of my science for kids posts I wrote about in a different Jupiter science lesson, and then I left you hanging for almost two months wondering how the rest of our Jupiter studies went.

Jupiter's weather

And I apologize for that, I’ve been feeling rather blah writing about our science adventures because it’s felt like none of them have gone right this year.  They all took loads of retries and I’ve been burned out a bit on the whole thing.

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Why you need to study clouds to understand Jupiter’s weather

Jupiter art project

Let’s take a second and talk about Jupiter.  Jupiter is a fun planet, it’s a gas giant, it’s a proto star, it’s so big all of the inner planets can fit inside it and roll around easily.  It also has giant storms.

I mean giant storms.  All of the colors we see when we look at Jupiter are giant chemical storms that would destroy us in a heart beat if we were on that surface, so we needed to study clouds first (see what I mean about nothing going right).

Jupiter lesson for kids

We took what we learned from watching videos of people successfully forming clouds and then transferred that to wind storms.  Here in our part of Texas we get some pretty fierce wind storms, but not tornadoes too frequently.  So we knew how wind can blow clouds around and make it all confusing.

Then for the grand demonstration, I pulled out the tornado tube*, and some red food dye (after all Jupiter’s giant storm is red).

Jupiter science lesson

And we observed how a tornado works.  It’s much bigger at the top than it is at the bottom.  So in theory, Jupiter’s giant red spot is much smaller at the surface of Jupiter.  It also has to be a violent storm that is continually being agitated because our tornado died down after a little bit, just like ones here on Earth do.

 

And having taught the main points I wanted them to get out of it, I let the kids have fun playing around with the tornado tube and generally learning from exploring.  That all by itself can be worth it.

How We Teach Kindle cover

Oh, and if you’ve ever wondered how it is I come up with all of these crazy ideas, I’d highly suggest picking up a copy of “How We Teach*.”  It’s just out and I wrote a couple of the chapters in the book (including one on astronomy).  It’s only $6.99 and I know there’s something in this book to help your homeschool day go well.

How-We-Teach-Instagram

All week long an Instagram challenge is going on and each day someone wins a copy of “How We Teach.”

science 4th grade, astronomy

Comments

  1. Natalie PlanetSmartyPants says

    May 6, 2015 at 11:34 am

    This is a fun lesson! It’s hard to imagine how big the storms on Jupiter must be. I keep toying with the idea of getting a tornado tube 🙂

    Reply
    • Ticia says

      May 6, 2015 at 3:25 pm

      According to our astronomy textbook, the storm’s diameter is bigger than the diameter of Earth!

      Phyllis has a whole bunch of really great ideas for using a tornado tube, that I’m looking forward to trying out.

  2. maryanne @ mama smiles says

    May 6, 2015 at 5:48 pm

    Tornado tubes are so much fun! I need to find ours…

    Reply
    • Ticia says

      May 6, 2015 at 8:08 pm

      I’ve left ours attached to the 2 liter bottle with strict instructions NOT to throw it out. So far that has worked.

  3. Phyllis says

    May 6, 2015 at 6:56 pm

    Don’t lose hope. We all go through these periods with science demonstrations. I just am not brave enough to post about them. LOL I like your approach to this study.

    Reply
    • Ticia says

      May 6, 2015 at 8:09 pm

      It was a really fun approach, and then it extended over to the other gas giants because we could keep referring back to it.

  4. Marie-Claude Leroux says

    May 7, 2015 at 8:05 pm

    You know, I’ve never tried a tornado tube, I’ll have to pick one up. This is a fun approach to learn about planets.

    Reply
    • Ticia says

      May 8, 2015 at 8:42 am

      It’s been really fun, the later planets it’s been quite a bit of writing as it’s more of comparing and contrasting things, but that’s been good for my writing averse kids.

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Ticia Adventures in Mommydom Hi, I'm Ticia! This is the adventures of my family in life and learning. Follow along with us as we share our adventures. We're having a lot of fun and learning as we go.

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