This week, we finished planning our videos on the Life Cycle of Stars. We created the visuals, audios, and written captions for the videos, which I will be putting together.

Late last week, we built on the last session to complete the life cycle of the star. We reviewed how stars come to life, before diving into the three main types of star death. We learned that stars become white dwarf stars, neutron stars, or black holes depending on mass. We also learned about the clouds of material that are left behind - nebulas - and how these clouds are important to the overall cycle.

This week, we built on our knowledge of the Sun to talk about the relationship between the Sun and the Earth.

As we dove into the topic of astronomy, we first took a look at our very own star: the Sun! We learned what happens inside of our star to get a general idea of the nature of stars. The girls are all very inquisitive scholars, and we covered A LOT for one lesson!

As we begin learning about the life cycle of a star, we started looking at the process that get gaseous clouds moving to created a whirling vortex of space dust which eventually results in a proto-star with a lot of built up pressure.

Because a light year is the distance light travels in one year, this tells us how many years it takes for the light to reach us from another object, and vice versa. We discovered what we would see happening on earth if we were located on different objects in space (and had very powerful, magical telescopes). We went further and further away until we could see complex life evolving on earth!

This week, it's all about scale. We compared the distance, brightness, and size of each star to the others in Orion. We travelled from 1 mm to 1 cm to 1 dm until we reached 1 km, then we kept going until we reached 1 lightyear.