Space unit, day 2 - creation and the shape of the Earth

We started off by exploring our place in the universe
I had a giant box labelled 'The Universe' covered in pictures from the Hubble telescope - inside I had a series of small nesting boxes working from the Milky Way down to Our House (from Google Earth) as the smallest.

Universe, Milky Way, Solar System, Earth, Continent, Country, County, Village and our house

The girls revisited the space mat, labelling all the planets and singing their song.

We then discussed all the creation myths - world as a turtle, lotus flower petal etc.
We used an upturned bowl  and play doh people to explain why people came up with the turtle idea

and why they thought the earth was flat as opposed to round.

As we are Christian we focused on the Bible creation and discussed how scientists think the universe was created by a big bang and is still expanding (using a balloon with dots on to show the theory) - DD8 was so cute, she got all serious when telling her sisters that the scientists should know that God can make a big bang if he wanted so he still created the universe.

We discussed how early people thought the earth was a different shape (bowl for turtle shell, circular lid for flat earth and globe for sphere) and how the ancient Greeks learned that the earth was round like a ball by studying the moon.
We took a circle of paper for the moon and stuck it on the wall
Positioned our globe and shone a flashlight across the globe onto the moon - creating the crescent effect.

even when we turned the globe it still created the crescents.

we then recreated it with a flat circular lid - it did create a crescent in the right position but when you turned it around it created a strange moon which the girls all agreed they had never seen.
The bowl also had the same problem - it sometimes created a crescent but at other times created odd shadows.

We finished up by reading 'Eratosthenes - the Librarian who measured the Earth', narrating it and writing up our notes.