Science 4 - Space Videos

Though a video of this length may at first seem a bit long for students of this age (always worrying that it is going to go into too great of depth), this video is a bit long, but it truly touches on just the surface of telescopes. It has this greater length due to the emphasis put on some key vocabulary words, and the use of analogies that may help students to better understand; the analogy used of rain bucket sizes and the collection of water is a great comparison to the lenses and mirrors of telescopes.

This is a very quick video that has lots of history and trivia behind Galileo Galilei. It gives an overview of some of the discoveries he was able to make in the night sky with a telescope. (Though one real issue I have with this video is that it makes mention that he discovered Neptune--Neptune wasn't discovered for over 200 years after Galileo's death, so I'm not sure where this came from...) That one piece aside, in addition to talking about how he used the telescope, it does give accurate information about some of his other key discoveries involving such ideas as the periods of pendula and inertia. 

This video touches on the different types of stars that make up our night sky, and explains why the stars we have in the night sky have different brightness, colours, and amount that they "twinkle." It does have some content that is a bit above the grade four level, but these are topics that tend to interest young minds (eg. black holes and sopernovae).

Though the video does no begin to touch on the use of binoculars at night for viewing the sky, it does give a very clear and brief explanation of how the magnification of binoculars are measured, and the benefits and drawbacks to binoculars with greater/lesser magnification.

This video is a great review of the ideas of the earth's daily rotation and annual revolution around the sun, as it uses this model to explain why the star vidible to us change throughout the year. This video effectively addresses one of the outcomes that directly states that "Earth’s daily rotation and yearly revolution around the Sun causes the constellations to appear in different locations at different times," and it does it in less than four minutes! 

This video starts out with a great question to your students asking them what some key differences are about the skies of the day and night. It then moves into how we have been grouping stars together to create "objects" or "pictures" for thousands of years; this leads into the definition of a constellation. Jessi then does a great job of a cross-cultural comparison of the many interpretations of Ursa Major. This is followed by brief mention of a few other constellations, and concludes with the key idea that wee can have our own interpretations to make up our own constellations.

This video opens with a nice overview of our solar system before moving out of it to look at the many stars of our universe. This video has some key traits such as personifying stars (in the mention that they are born and die) and attempting to explain and illustrate the idea that some of the stars that we currently see may have already died. The focus of this video is that it makes mention of roughly a dozen different constellations, and give the story behind each constellation.

This video does a good job of integrating the use of constellations to identify individual stars. Sabrina even makes the colloquial substitution of the typical naming of stars in a constellation from (as an example) Sirius-α and Sirius-ß with the names "Sirius-A" and "Sirius-B." The constellations that are then shown are all contextualized from various movies and stories that your students might be familiar with. 

This video places emphasis on words that are needed (eg. axis, revolution, rotation) to really understand what is taking place over the period of both a day and a year. 

This video opens up with a review of how a year is a revolution of the earth around the sun, and then goes into the idea that a month is derived from roughly the length of time it takes the moon to revolve around the earth. Though it is complete trivia, the last half of this video looks at the naming of each month, but you can place emephasis on the fact that these were names given for each revolution of the moon.

Bringing the key words "rotation" and "revolution" in their relationship to a day and a year, this video manages to show these key ideas without needing to put the term "axis" to use. Throughout this video, Jessi manages to explain seasons by repeatedly referring to the "tilting" of the earth without your students needing to undertand and apply the word "axis."

What is really nice in this video is that it has a collection of components, and those components have been divided into about a dozen chapters within this video. Though you may not want to have your students watch all of the chapters in this entire video, there are certainly some interesting pieces that apply to a good number of the outcomes involving the calendar. 

There is one key piece in this video that none of the other videos realy address that is a vital idea involving the earth: the rotation and the revolution of the earth are completely independent of each other. There are many other pieces in this video that touch on the scientific components of the calendar (the solstices and exuinoxes) but it also begins to compare our calendar to the lunar calendars of other cultures.