Science Sunday- The Star named Sun + field trip

As much as I love doing science with kiddos, I must confess it is not my usual favorite subject to plan  (being a liberal arts major all my life (and being told by "kind" teachers that science is not my thing all my life)). However this year I'm thoroughly enjoying it. September and October were dedicated to animals in general, and Colorado animals in particular. The November and December are going to be all about Space.
We had a great start learning about the Sun and having most amazing field trip to the Fiske Planetarium and Sommers-Bausch Observatory in Boulder.
The trip was organized by our amazing co-op -we saw the show about Sun's influence on the Earth at the Planetarium and got an incredibly interesting observatory tour. It was a lot of information for us to process afterwards, but D. was absolutely charmed by being given a chance to look at the sun and two stars (all that is visible in the daylight) through the huge telescopes.

looking for Venus

I had no idea that there is such a great place not so far away from us and now I believe we will visit both planetarium and the observatory  quite often. The observatory has open house events which allow general public to do some stargazing every Friday during semester.

Before going to the planetarium we read about our Sun and talked about its importance to all that is alive.

Our reading material this week included our favorite encyclopedia- Universe from DK publishing ( as I have written before the latest editions come with handy posters that look great on our wall)

This book is always fun for little ones :

Another source of information is a book that we found on NASA webpage (some info is still beyond D.'s comprehension, but he got a good idea of what sun does)
Super Star meets the plucky planet storybook

The teacher's guide on NASA webpage is most helpful as well:
NASA'a teacher resources about Earth and Sun connection .pdf

The Sun images gallery is this way .
Great video about Sun:

The answer to the question how big is the sun and earth was provided by this image and video:

Our craft was quite simple- D. simply cut out a shape of sun and colored it with oil pastels- now it warms up our art display

Another great thing? Why, the Sun songs of course :)