First grade students in Ms. Gerrard’s class at Davis Elementary have been learning how to county by tens to 100 in math (SOL1.2). They have also been studying about the Earth and sun in science (SOL1.6). So today we combined both topics into one lesson using Pixie & Keynote… a big task for first graders, but they were up for it! In my research I learned that the sun is about 870,000 miles in diameter and the Earth is about 8,000 miles in diameter, so about 100 (more like 110) Earths can cross the sun. But I wanted to find a unit they could use to count by tens, and I discovered that Jupiter is the perfect unit. It is about 87,000 miles in diameter. So about 10 Earths can cross Jupiter (more like 11) and 10 Jupiters can cross the sun. I created a Keynote template with most of the animations for this activity pre-built into it. You can click here to download it. I’ve done my work, now it’s time for the students to do their work. First they opened Pixie and, working with a partner, one drew a big picture of the sun and the other drew a picture of the Earth. We helped them take screenshots of their pictures and place them into their Keynotes. Next they added some transitions and animations using the Inspector. Finally they recorded their voices telling about how big the sun is and counting the Earths by tens to a hundred. You can see some student examples here: Mickaelly & Adin, Jakob & Nardeen.
