Science in the News

Science is everywhere and keeps expanding more and more as we learn about the natural and physical world. For the science in the news project I chose to focus on articles about a very interesting topic to me; astronomy. I researched articles on astronomy and most of these articles came from Newsela. Newsela is an awesome website to find informational articles on just about anything you are looking for. It is very kid friendly website and can be geared towards all different reading levels. I chose eight articles that I thought were important and resourceful for anyone researching or learning about astronomy and combined them together in a glogster to make a scrapbook of these articles. All of the articles I chose were pretty recent and relevant to whats going on in the world today. The first article I chose focused on learning about the constellations and how they can help you sort the stars scattered in the night sky. I enjoyed this article a lot because it started off comparing the constellations to the first day of school.

"Remember your first day of school — entering that classroom and finding yourself confronted by a roomful of unfamiliar faces? Even on that first day, you probably made a few friends. Through them, and with your day-to-day exposure to the classroom, you gradually became acquainted with all of your classmates. Learning the constellations is like that. With a little help from your friends (easy-to-find guidepost constellations) and a willingness to "show up for class" on successive nights, you'll soon feel comfortable in your nighttime surroundings." (Chaple, 2008).

I loved how the author compared learning about the constellations to making friends and getting by with help by your friends as your progress throughout the school year. The next article was about how scientists are finding more to study about the milky way also portraits get larger. I liked this article because I've always wanted to learn more about the milky way galaxy and it goes into depth about important details about it. Another article that I found very intriguing was about the super moon. I thought this was very relevant because it happened very recently on November 14th, 2016. I think it was super cool how the super moon was as closest to the Earth as it has been since 1948! This article went in depth about how rare this super moon is and all of the great qualities about it. 

Making this glogster was super easy and fun! It is a great tool to use in a classroom for a variety of assignments. For example, in my future classroom I might ask my students to find articles and do a research paper on these articles. Making a glogster would be fun for them to incorporate all of their articles in one and keep everything organized. It is also a fun tool because you can choose a layout that is already made, or upload your own background! For my astronomy scrapbook made on glogster, I used a pretty galaxy for my background. 

After making my scrapbook, we were instructed to get into groups and make a timeline and word cloud based on our articles. We used tiki toki, a great tool to make a time line. It was very confusing and hard to use, but once you knew how to do it, it came out really cool and you are able to do it in 3D. This would be a great tool to introduce to students if they have to make a time line for a project and I would definitely use this in my future classroom!