At the end of last Friday, I introduced my class to a flash animation called The Scale of the Universe (the link is at the end of this post). It is fascinating to see! Once my students had a chance to explore the images on their own, we took the computers over to Elaine's room to show the Kindergartners and first graders. Each of my kids had two or three younger students crowding around to look at their computer, and it was their job to explain what the animation shows. I heard delightful lessons going on all around the room: "Do you know what a nebula is? Well, it's this big cloud of dust and gas in space, where stars form..." "See how my fingers are touching? But they're not, really, because the atoms aren't touching because there's so much space inside an atom..." The parts of an atom are certainly are a lot smaller than the atom itself!
Watching my class teaching the younger kids all about what they were looking at—hearing the quiet excitement in the room, and the exclamations of, "That's so cool!" and seeing the instant rapport that sprang up between the different ages as they explained and learned—was one of the most beautiful moments I think I've seen in any classroom.
Here's the URL for the animation they were looking at:
http://www.freeworldgroup.com/games8/gameindex/scaleoftheuniverse.htm
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