Lensyl Urbano – Page 25 – Montessori Muddle

Viewing the Night Sky with Stellarium

Jupiter shines above the moon. Image generated for St. Louis, MO, USA at 9:30pm on May 31, 2014 using the program Stellarium. — Jupiter shines above the Moon. Image generated for St. Louis, MO, USA at 9:30pm on May 31, 2014 using the program Stellarium.

I received an urgent email last night from a student who, while in the car last night, noticed a bright object above the moon. Was it a planet as her mom suggested? And if so which one? And do planets generate their own light or are we just seeing reflected light?

The last question was the easiest. The planets don’t generate light. You need something big and hot and fusiony, like a star, to generate light.

To figure out what the bright object was I did an internet search for star charts, and came across the Texas Astronomical Society’s webpage “Star Charts for Beginners“, which pointed me to the excellent, free program Stellarium.

You can use Stellarium to generate labeled images of the sky for almost any time, date, and place.

It looks like Jupiter could be seen above the Moon last night.

Dandelion Season

The last two weeks have been peak dandelion season here in eastern Missouri, so I’ve been experimenting with the culinary uses of the flowers.

Dipped in batter and fried, the flower heads did not taste like much. Probably too much seasoning and too much batter. It was good advice to cut off as much of the green outer covering (the sepals) because they are bitter. However, if you cut too close to the base of the petals they fall out all over the place, which is good if you want to collect just the petals.

Collecting the petals only is great if you’re trying to make dandelion wine (I’m adapting the second recipe from here), except that I’m only using petals (2 quarts). I keep the same amount of sugar (3 lbs), oranges (4), water (1 gallon), and yeast (winemaker’s). This is the appropriate timing for this project since we just covered the differences between aerobic respiration and fermentation.

Two quarts (about 4 liters) of dandelion flowers for making a gallon of wine.

The Chicken Coops are Here

Finding the right place for the chicken coops.

Now that we’re at the end of the academic year, our middle school business’ chicken coops have finally arrived (they were on back order). The kids had some fun finding the right spot for the coops, and we staked out an area for fencing; we plan to clip the birds’ wings.

Although, the coops came pre-assembled, the students needed to make some final adjustments.

Tomorrow, during math, they’ll be finding the perimeter so we can order fencing, and finding the area so we can know how much space we’ll have per bird.

Waves in the Creek

We talked about waves today down at the creek. The water was fairly calm so we could make some nice surface waves using floating leaves to show the up-down/side-to-side motion as the waves passed. I gave them 10 minutes to “play”, and more than one team tried to make a tsunami.

Since it’s allergy season, one student who could not go outside, read the chapter on the characteristics of waves and prepared a short–5 minutes–presentation for the rest of the class when we came back in.

Annotated image highlighting the crests of the waves and the wavelength.

The Apiary is in Business

As of this Saturday, we have two bee hives. With bees. Ms. Mertz and Mr. Deitrich received a pair of nukes (bees with a queen in a box) that were driven up, overnight, from Louisiana. They let them acclimatize for a few hours, with the nukes sitting on top of their respective hives, before putting them in. The nukes seem healthy; we were able to identify two queens and the bees were out foraging immediately. Ms. Mertz is happy.