Almanacs in Astronomy Classes

In memory of my maternal grandmother Dorothy Marie Blalock Clark (1912-1997) TL;DR: Ubiquitous farmers’ almanacs are an inexpensive printed source of accurate astronomical information despite being mostly advertising vehicles. This information can be used in the classroom to generate questions and learning about not only astronomy, but also history, mathematics, and computation. Thanks to my […]

Learning Critical Thinking Through Astronomy, Week 16

What time is it anyway, and what does that question even mean? I want to describe a classroom activity that is the culmination of our discussion of time. I’ll start with a brief description of the background leading up to this activity and then describe the activity itself. If there is any aspect of astronomy […]

Planning the Perfect Date…Astronomy Style

Relax…I promise there’s an astronomical connection here! Every semester just after the activity on lunar illumination (my way of saying lunar phases), I give a short lecture on eclipses and then ask the class if they would like to know how to plan the perfect date. This surprising question gets a lot of interested looks, […]

The Learning Critical Thinking Through Astronomy Activities

I am somewhat limited in what I say in this post because I don’t want to give anything important away to students who find my blog (not that I care if they do). It occurred to me today that a post describing my astronomy course materials might be helpful for anyone considering using them or […]

A Diversity Experiment

Today I decided to try something new in my introductory astronomy class. I wanted to get a quick insight into what students think about diversity while in the safe haven of the classroom. Our classroom activities have “checkpoints” interspersed throughout so students can, quite literally, have a meeting of the minds in the center of […]

Building Up to Simultaneity (Activity)

Here’s a classroom activity intended to demonstrate the issue of simultaneity in measuring a stick’s length. Students need a calibrated metre stick (I’m trying to get into the habit of spelling it that way), another stick approximately 1/3 m long although the precise length is unimportant, two coins of the same denomination or two small pea-size balls […]