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This week we are doing a fun Atmosphere Unit Study with four chapters from Earth and Space by Bright Ideas Press. Who knew there were so many fun activities to do with the air that surrounds us all the time? The first fabulous idea from the book was to make a huge mural on the wall. The book recommends putting up construction paper on the wall, in different shades of blue. This is easier than what I did, which was to paint the wall. I’m kidding. I didn’t paint the actual wall. We painted rolled-out butcher paper that we stapled to the wall. You can play music and dance around while you paint the butcher paper with your kids, adding more and more white to your blue paint, the higher up you go.
Oh, yes, I almost forgot to mention this gorgeous coloring page from the book. It reminds me of the hot air balloon ride I took over England, back when I was a teacher there. Ah, yes… I landed on top of my soon-to-be-husband, and the rest is history. Some day I would love to take my kids up in a hot air balloon, maybe in the autumn when the leaves are changing colors. What an awesome homeschool field trip that would be! The sky is the limit with what you can do in your homeschool! (pun intended)
Let me try to get my head out of the clouds to tell you more about the atmosphere mural. It looked gorgeous, and we labeled the different sections of the atmosphere. Then we glued on a skyline of a city on the bottom, and we added some clouds and airplanes and whatnot throughout the sky. The children wanted to have a meteor coming out of the sky and hitting the city, destroying it to smithereens. They laughed hysterically, and I had to calm them down before the entire city was demolished by their hysteria, since they had made tiny paper airplanes, which they were crashing against the city. Sigh. We don’t have enough fun in our family.
We made a homemade barometer and psychrometer, using the instructions in the book. You can see us putting those together in the video. We filled out the chart, keeping track of the atmospheric pressure and humidity each day for a week. It was fun to measure the atmosphere in different rooms in the house from day to day.
Finally, we drew a pie chart on a pie plate, I mean a paper plate, to represent the composition of the atmosphere. I’m sure that the writer of the book assumed we would have large paper plates. We had tiny ones, which saved us on marker ink, which is what the kids used to fill in the pie charts. Mmmm… Pie….
