Solar eclipses are teachable moments! We’ve created a 45-minute classroom activity for school teachers in Angola, which can be downloaded below as a PDF in English or Portuguese.
It’s part of our Global Communication and Science project to mark the Angolan solar eclipse on February 26th: we’re running a public workshop/seminar at the Instituto Superior de Ciências de Educação (ISCED) in the city of Huambo; we’re giving away eclipse glasses to members of the community; and we’re doing a live broadcast with the astronomy network Slooh.
We’re extremely grateful to timeanddate.com, our lead sponsor, and NCR Angola, who are sponsoring our eclipse glasses. We’ve also had tremendous support from the Angolan Ministry of Higher Education, and the Provincial Government of Huamb0.
Our classroom activity is called “Space is enormous!”, or “O espaço é enorme!”. It tackles a popular misconception – that the earth, moon and sun are similar size, and close together in space – by asking schoolchildren to imagine the earth was 10 cm across. It also challenges pupils to think about questions such as: why don’t solar eclipses happen every month…?
You can download the activity here:
We’d like to say a huge ‘thank you’ to Mário José da Costa Rodrigues, Ndjimi Dumba Watembo Malaka and the rest of the outstanding team at ISCED. Enormous thanks also to Paul Cox, Tricia Ennis and all the other incredible people at Slooh.
Ten Sentences 