Below are ideas for extending this topic beyond the activity & exploration which you just completed.

• Lesson Assessment and Answer Key
• Activities: Activities connecting to ELA & geography.
• Activity: Adopt a Constellation
• Vocabulary Tip: Rotate vs. Revolve
• Online Resource: Explore the skies with photographs.

• Sky Heroes — Students work in groups to identify a hero and to create a constellation to honor that person. Activity created by PBS is here and sky maps are here.

• Finding Your Way to Mars, Pennsylvania — Students search the atlas for towns and natural landmarks with astronomical names.

• Adopt a Constellation — Students research and write about their favorite constellation — which could be a familiar star pattern or a constellation from another culture.

Have each student adopt a constellation and write about it.

The NASA Starchild website tells four stories from different cultures inspired by constellations.

You can find Native American myths related to stars on the Native Languages of the Americas website. A list of books that tell a Native American and African star myths is here.

A list of constellations that the ancient Greeks saw can be found here. You can search these constellations alphabetically or by season for more information.

Each day, APOD features a different photograph of the universe, along with a short explanation by an astronomer. There's also a searchable APOD Archive.

Here are a few photos to get you started:

• Look for Orion, here — and then search for the bright stars of his belt in this snapshot from the International Space Station?
• Your students may have heard of the Big Dipper and the Little Dipper, but have they seen them in the sky? Move your mouse onto the photo to see the connecting lines.

Two words you will sometimes see to describe the Earth’s two movements are “rotate” and “revolve.” “Rotate” is the word used to describe Earth’s spin around its axis, which it completes once each day. “Revolve” is the word used to describe the Earth’s movement in its orbit around the sun, which takes one year to complete.

ROTATE = SPIN
REVOLVE = ORBIT

Both of these words start with the letter “r” and come from Latin, so at first it might be easy to mix them up. But here’s a helpful mnemonic device for keeping them straight:

“Rotate has an ‘a’ like ‘axis’.”