Need help teaching children

Hey astro pals,
I was not sure where to post so here goes. I am teaching an astromony/ space class in a summer. Any ideas for my lesson plans or cool things to keep the kids interested. They are our future astronmers you know. I know a lot of you belong to astronomy clubs and I am sure yall teach them something.
Sonya

As a beginner myself, I can't offer much sage advice. However, you might take a look at NightSky magazine. It often has good tips for beginners.

Do you have access to a kitchen? I teach a class to 4th and 5th graders, and everyone's favorite is making constellation cookies. I use multi-color star sprinkles and a couple of those frozen cookie dough rolls. It gets messy, but is a lot of fun!

Hugh Bartlett

Everybody needs help teaching!!!

What age--What brings them together? Are they a club, a camp, a what?

Where are you going to be doing this?

How long will you be teaching them (once a week for an hour, all summer long every evening)?

Alex

You could check out things like The Artemis Project
( http://www.asi.org/ ) which is concieved as a private venture for tourist excursions to the moon. They could do things like design a commercial lunar base, Mars colony, or space station with tourist amenities, create a business plan for such a venture, or design an ad campaign in support of something like that... 8)

Sonya,

Since this is a daytime summer program you might want to go to the NASA web pages for Cassini and Mars Exploration Rovers. The kids might find it neat to know we have robots on Mars and orbiting Saturn.

Dave

Sonya,

Your range of kids ages makes it a bit difficult but here's something we came up with for a local space camp for the 12-17 year old range. "Astronomy 1 & 2" by The Standard Deviants comes in DVD or VHS versions. It can be ordered from a company called Just For Kids (do a Google search for them, then in their web site search for "astronomy 1&2").

The Standard Deviants are a bunch of teenagers who present the subject matter in a corny but effective manner that appeals to kids of many ages.