The Sun and Us

Overview

I am creating a unit entitled: Stardust Students: Our Class Cosmos of the Stars. This is a four-week unit, in which I will begin the unit by giving the students an overview of the universe, galaxy and solar system: planets, moons, Sun and stars.  The next component for students will be learning about the Sun as a star, including the concept of solar energy.  Students will use this time to learn about the different properties of the Sun, its existence as a star, and how it relates to the topic of stars in general.  The unit will then then explore the formation and life of a star. Once this context is in place, the unit will be at the point of its main focus, which is the classification of stars.  Stars and their characteristic make-up the bulk of the Curriculum Unit, and this is the topic students will research for their culminating project.

The main section of the Unit will be learning about the life and characteristics of a star.  Students will learn about how stars are categorized by color, temperature, mass, luminosity, apparent brightness, location, distance and sounds.  Students will catalog this information about stars into an interactive journal and into a concept map about stars.  This knowledge of the properties of a star, will culminate into a Class Cosmos, where students will create their own star, by selecting different characteristics of their star and creating a model.  Students will complete a display board that shows the characteristics of their star.  These stars will be put together into a whole class display and presentation.  At the end of the Unit, we will purchase a star through a naming directory and name it after our class! This unit will give my students greater understanding of scientific processes and thinking and the solar system including the sun and stars.  This will also give my students an opportunity to engage in STEM activities as a class.

Students will learn about the life of a star, and the changes that it goes through over its lifetime.  We will discuss the census of stars, and their relation to the Earth and the Sun, as well as discuss stars that are able to be seen with the human eye and how atypical they are in terms of distance.⁸ Our discussion will include the birth and formation of a star.  We will discuss the steps of this star formation and how it begins with a core, gas and dust.⁹ For students to truly understand stars, their life, components and characteristics, they must understand what they see with stars, as opposed to what stars really look like up close.  To address this, students will also explore the concept of luminosity and how it compares to apparent brightness of stars.¹⁰ We will then discuss how stars are classified in terms of brightness, color and temperature.  This will be an integral part to the final curriculum unit project that students will take part in, as students will be replicating this identification in a chart for their own project.  We will also discuss the distance from earth a star is, and the concept of light years.¹¹ Some additional stellar properties that we will discuss are the same as those we will discuss about the Sun in the introduction to the unit.  These include mass, radius, surface temperature, core temperature, luminosity, average density and age.¹² We will also discuss the size, shape and metallicity of stars in terms of their evolution over time.¹³ Additionally, I will also present my students with the sounds that stars can make. My hope is that this will inspire them to engage more with the learning process about stars.