Churchill Science

203, 206 and 205 are learning about different parts of the food chain. Here are two fun videos about decomposers:

Click here to play!

This is a fun game for young children to learn about life cycles. 225 played this game in science class!

Pretty amazing. It seems that everywhere we look in the solar system, there are things to surprise us. The speaker in this video is a little hard to understand, but he said something very interesting – that the salt in the water, plus other discoveries they made, mean that there are the right chemicals for possibly creating life. Forget life on other planets – we should be looking for life on other moons!

It’s the 40th anniversary of the Apollo 11 landing on the Moon. Click on the picture to visit wechoosethemoon.org, an interactive website that is tracking the mission as though it were happening right now. It features audio, photos, and videos.

After June 20th, the site will stay up and you will be able to click through the entire mission from start to finish.

I love the description of Venus as “Earth’s evil twin”…

This video will make a LOT of sense if you’ve played Alien Safari! (see previous post)

How long would it take to take a car to Mars? What about an airplane to the moon? Click the picture to find out!

Find “alien life” here on Earth and learn about where we might find similar life on planets and moons out in our solar system!

One of the Mars rovers, Spirit, has been stuck in some loose sand for a while. This video shows how scientists on Earth are trying to help get it out.

221 played this game on Friday… we collected all 12 cards with no problem! So we moved on to something a bit more challenging…

If you want to make this game more challenging for yourself, try filling them in in reverse order, or from the middle out…

Hopefully we’ll be posting more solar system games soon!

Click on the picture to play the game!

From Ask an Astronomer…

The shuttle landing has been delayed again due to bad weather at the landing site. So, no video to show you of the landing yet.

In the meantime, here are some of the best images from Hubble over the years:

Want to explore Mars? You don’t need to build a multimillion dollar satellite or send a rover. Instead all you need is a web browser and Google Mars:

Click on the image to try!

Also, if you have the latest version of Google Earth on your computer, you can access Google Mars in 3D! Highly recommended!

A baby mammoth was recently discovered mummified in ice. Here’s a video clip explaining the discovery:

To explore the mammoth discovery, click on the picture:

The Cluster B classes have been studying the planets in our own solar system and finding out why Earth is so unique and special. But could there be planets somewhere else in the universe that we could live on? Recently scientists announced that they have found some…

The red glowing object is Gliese 581, a red dwarf star. There are several rocky planets orbiting it, each named for the star – Gliese 581c, Gliese 581d, and Gliese 581e. Last week, scientists announced that “d” and “e” were the planets most like Earth that have ever been found.

Here’s a video showing the whole system:

This next video shows some planets that orbit around other stars, that could be like our own planet Earth. These stars are very far away and it is currently too hard to take a picture of them, much less go there. The video also talks about why Venus and Mars didn’t end up having life, the way Earth did.

Here are some of the planets that Cluster B created using Planet 10. To make your own planets, click on these photos!

Ruby’s Astro Planet

Chloe’s Planet

Ruby and Chloe – what happened to your planets? Did they succeed?