Katherine Rueff's blog

Yesterday was the 1st day of ASTRO Week at LaSalle Academy in Mrs. Modlin’s 6th grade class.
I gave a presentation involving a lot of discussion, guessing, and picking-of-the-brain for the 1hr 45 min block periods.

The students learned about some famous astronomers, the different types of telescopes in all wavelengths, what we can DO with so many different telescopes, and lastly about Notre Dame’s connection to different telescopes around the world and in space (including some discussion of my research).

It was a good start to the week, with the rest of the week filled with learning about the constellations, the solar system, and stellar evolution.

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Today was the LAST day of the ASTRO Week at Stanley Clark.
The students ventured ALL the way to Notre Dame for a DVT Show where we traveled to every planet, some moons, out through the Galaxy, and around the Universe!

At the end of the DVT show the students and teachers presented Mrs. Dolan and me GOODIE BAGS!
Filled with Star Thank You cards from each of the students, Milky Way bars!, Double Stuffed Oreos, Eclipse Mints, Orbits Gum, and great Stanley Clark School gifts! So thoughtful in every way for astronomers

As the students were leaving the DVT, I got a little emotional, and realized I won’t get to see them all again, I even had everyone’s name learned!

A bunch of them gave me a big group hug as they were walking out, and I couldn’t help but realize that I’d gotten quickly attached to this group of students.
They were so eager to learn, with fantastic manners, a great enthusiasm for science, and over all just the best students you could want!  I was consistently impressed each day, and I know they will continue to impress others in the future.

I’ll miss the SCS students, but I know that they are REAL Astronomers now (We promoted them after their DVT show with “The Oath” of being a good astronomer), and that they will be great students in the future, and hopefully some, maybe even all, will go on to become great scientists!

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Day 3 of Astro Week in Mrs. Haven’s 2nd grade class at Stanley Clark!
Hello Out There Planets!
The students competed in two teams to accurately measure out the distances (using scientific methods of steps in a row) and once all the planets were set, including the Sun, Asteroid Belt, and Pluto (which counted for all 5 of the dwarf planets), then the students played TELEPHONE!

I was unaware, but Telephone is a VERY popular game in 2nd grade, the students were not only very excited about playing, they were so excited WHILE playing, both teams changed the message both times we tried it….
1st Telephone Phrase: Astronomers reach for the stars
1st Answers: Team 1: Astronomers are rock stars Team 2: Astronomy
2nd Telephone Phrase: Neptune is Blue, Mars is Red
2nd Answers: Team 1: Mars is red, Neptune is blue Team 2: Neptune is blue, Pluto is red.

Again, the students wrote up on the board extra questions they had… One that stuck out to me was “Where do they get their colors”, which is a very tough question to answer and not go too far out into techinical terms of chemistry.

Tomorrow Shelley is giving a detailed look at THE SUN, and I’m going to show pretty pictures of galaxies. This is in attempt to touch on what Shelley and I do for research at Notre Dame.

We’re also going to play “Stump the Astronomer!”, where the students have been tasked with asking Shelley and myself the HARDEST astronomy question they can think of and try to STUMP us!

Tomorrow’s lab will be “Draw Your Own Constellation”, where we’ve taken a REAL star field and the students get to come up and think of designs that they can see in the sky, and tell a story about them….

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Day 2 of ASTRO WEEK in Mrs. Haven’s 2nd Grade Science! We learned about the MOON & PLANETS!
You don’t get to eat Oreos in Nano, Enviro, or Bio?
Well you DO in ASTRO!
Seen above are the phases of the Moon as carved out by the 2nd Graders (working in pairs to minimize sugar intake).

At the end of the day, after lots of Oreo munching had taken place, Shelley and I handed out “homework”.  We specifically gave the students an astronomy based homework project that they HAVE to have help with from someone in their home.  This was one of our subliminal ways of engaging the parents in the student’s experience during Astro Week.  Throughout our work with NDeRC parent interaction has been heavily focused on as a vital point for fostering a full STEM community.
The Orion Constellation Lab requires the student go out “after dark” and try to find the Orion constellation.  The other option (since it is going to be cloudy all week unfortunately) is to have their parents and them find an astronomy based news article and write up a little discription on what they find.

The students are always so excited to ask questions, yesterday they decided to write up a whole board of questions on the Moon for when we came in today. I was incredibly surprised by the depth of questions, such as “Are the craters volcanoes” and “how hot is the moon”…. pretty amazing insight and curiosity!
Tomorrow is the Solar System with a distance lab similar to the one the teachers experienced during the Astro Institute this summer!

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Shelley Dolan and I are at Stanley Clark School with the 1st ever ASTRO WEEK in Mrs. Haven’s 2nd grade science class!
Today the 2nd graders, who all happily displayed their Name-tags that said “Junior Astrophysicist” underneath, were VERY eager to learn!

Shelley gave a quick powerpoint show to explain how the Earth is a magnet, what the Van Allen Belts are, and how the Aurora are created!

The 2nd graders were really quick to understand “charged particles” via the relationship to getting SHOCKED due to static electricity! Once they understood how there are these charged particles around, they learned how space charged particles get trapped in Earth’s magnetic fields and make the Aurora in Earth’s atmosphere.
(We related these invisible magents field lines to gravity as something that we FEEL, but can’t SEE… they are really good with gravity so far!)

Then it was time to play with magnets!
Shelley and I created this Magnet Constellation Game, where each pair of students had a pair of Chirping Magnets.

The teams competed at trying to put their magnets down on the constellation map without attracting the other team’s magnets.

In the end, the game went from being competitive to everyone in the group taking turns trying to put their magnets down before all the magnets “buzzed” together.

The 2nd graders greatly surprised me with their eagerness to add information to our discussion, every other minute we’d have a hand fly up and one of the students would share a semi-related story with the class. Normally, this would have delayed the class teaching time, but I’ve learned in my experience with trying to teach science, that the BEST way to get a student to really understand what science topic you’re tackling is to relate it to their own lives/experiences.

For example, when the students were trying to understand how opposite sides of the magnet attract, I asked if anyone had a brother or sister that they “JUST CAN’T STAND!”, and hands flew up all over the classroom, and I made the relationship that similar magnetic poles are like siblings that don’t get along because they’re too alike! They all seemed to like that comparison.

It was a great day in 2nd grade, tomorrow we are going to learn about the Moon, get to eat some Oreos to show the phases of the Moon, and discuss the unique traits of the rest of the Planets!

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