Here’s an odd fact: nearly every model of the solar system you’ve ever seen—every image, every 3D model, every coat-hanger-with-styrofoam-balls project—is wrong. Just wrong. This is because you need an enormous amount of space to create an accurate model. But this activity will give your son or daughter a sense of how big different objects in […]

Christopher Columbus is famous for “discovering” America in 1492 (and sailing the ocean blue). He really didn’t discover America, per se. The Russians, Chinese, and Vikings already knew about it—and, of course, the first people to the Americas were the native populations that had already been living there for thousands of years. (In many ways you […]

Every year I offer to teach a course in our homeschool co-op, and I’ve taught astronomy many of those years. One year I was given a class of 3rd and 4th graders, and the focus of the class was planetary astronomy. Every week I grilled them on the names of the 8 planets: Mercury, Venus, Earth, […]

A meteor is sometimes called a shooting star or falling star, but a meteor is not a star at all. Meteoroid vs. Meteor vs. Meteorite Space is full of things called meteoroids. These are small bits of rocky or metallic space junk. Most are pebble-sized. When one of these meteoroids gets too close to the […]