A Visit to the ESSL

Last week our class got to take their annual trip to the Earth Science and Space Lab, an out-of-this-world science center that is part of the Frederick County Public School system.  Its goal is to enrich and extend the science curriculum being taught in Frederick County Public School classrooms.  And what great timing for some enrichment!  Our class got to visit the ESSL right in the middle of our unit about space! 

At the ESSL, we listened to some great information about celestial objects.  Our class took part in reenacting the way our planets revolve around the sun.  We acted out the four seasons and explained what classifies a planet as a planet.  We also learned some new, lesser-known facts about the solar system!  Did you know...the Sun actually rotates on an axis too, just like Earth does?  That is why the Sun is a celestial object.

After our lesson, we got a chance to visit the state-of-the-art planetarium in the ESSL.  Here we used monoculars (one half of a binocular) to observe what the stars really look like in the night sky.  We pointed out constellations and even the planets that are visible from Earth!  The technology in the planetarium projects a realistic model of the night sky, so the students could go home that night an look for what they observed in the planetarium that day!

Here are a couple of pictures from our trip.

Thank you to our volunteers who came along on our trip.  Your help is always appreciated!  :-)