Sun Activities
The lessons below are teacher-favorite lessons focused on the sun. For more search options or to search by other science target, missions and other criteria, visit our Fast Lesson Finder. You can also search by curriculum standards on our popular Curriculum Standards Quilts.
Sun Lessons:
Tracking Sunspots: Using Real Data from SOHO (Spanish)
Grade Level: 9-12
Body: Sun
Mission: SOHO (Comets)
Short Description: Students observe sunspots and analyze their data to calculate the sun's rotation.
Transit Math
Topic: Math
Grade Level: 5-8, 9-12
Body: Sun, Mercury, Venus, Saturn, Kuiper Belt & Oort Cloud, Earth's Moon
Short Description: The introduction clearly explains the apparent "collisions," eclipses, transits, and occultations. The collection includes problems on synodic periods, planetary conjunctions, geometry, fractions, linear equations, and probability. The Table of Contents clearly separates middle school level problems from high school problems.
Transit of Venus Math
Grade Level: 5-8, 9-12
Body: Sun, Venus, Earth
Mission: Heliophysics (Sun), SOHO (Comets)
Short Description: This problem book covers 17 specific mathematics problems that are common to studying the transit of Venus more critically.
Voyage: A Journey Through Our Solar System -- Lesson 6: Where to Look For Life?
Grade Level: 5-8
Body: Our Solar System, Sun, Earth
Short Description: It is the most exciting question one can ask of the solar system: is life unique to Earth, or are there abodes of life on other planets -- even moons? A starting point is concluding that life as we know it requires liquid water. Given this constraint, in the first activity students explore a mathematical model for how temperature varies with distance from the sun. It allows them to find the "happy place" for possible life -- the range in distance from the sun within which a planet might contain liquid water. At first glance, it appears only Earth exists within this range. Students then plot the actual observed temperatures for planets and moons, which demonstrates that more than just distance from the sun accounts for planetary temperature, leading to potentially many abodes of life in the solar system. In the second activity students research the broader requirements for an abode of life, and whether these requirements are found on other worlds.
What Makes Shadows? Observing and Drawing Shadows
Grade Level: K-4
Body: Sun
Short Description: Students learn about shadows as they observe and draw the shadow of a classmate.
