A Rocket & Raven series
A free online Earth and space science course for Grades 6 to 8: day and night, Moon phases, eclipses, seasons, gravity, the scale of the solar system, rocks, rock layers and deep time, modeled with a lamp, a ball and a jar of sand, plus a solar-system model design project.
Earth and Space is a free online Earth and space science course for Grades 6 to 8 that uses only things a family already has: a flashlight or lamp, two balls, paper and a pencil, a tape measure, string, a plastic bottle with sand and soil, a roll of toilet paper and a few rocks from a walk. Students set up the Sky Deck at home, keep a Sky Log, and work the same questions as Rocket, Raven and Nova. Week by week they model why the Sun rises and sets, reproduce the Moon's phases with a lamp and a ball, cast the shadows that make eclipses, show with a slanted flashlight why tilt makes the seasons, roll a marble to see how gravity holds the solar system together, model the disk of dust and gas it formed from, walk the distances between planets to scale, cut planet sizes from paper using NASA data, sort rocks by how they formed, settle layers of sand and soil to read Earth's history from the bottom up, and unroll a timeline of 4.6 billion years down the hallway. It ends with a scale model of the solar system the student designs, builds, measures and improves. Every fact comes from a NASA, OpenStax or United States Geological Survey page listed in the course sources. Short lessons run Monday to Friday, with a hands-on Sky Deck Lab each week, and Saturday is Sky Night with the family.
The course is free, start to finish.
Free online Earth and space science course · 12 weeks
A porch-step space lab: day and night, Moon phases, eclipses, seasons, gravity, the scale of the solar system, rocks, deep time and a solar-system model design project.
Nothing. Earth and Space is free from start to finish, with no card. A free parent account saves each student's progress.
A flashlight or a lamp, a ball for Earth and a smaller ball or an orange for the Moon, a pencil, paper and grid paper, a ruler or tape measure, string, a clear plastic bottle with a lid, a little sand, soil and gravel from outside, a roll of toilet paper for the timeline, scissors, a mixing bowl and a marble, and a few loose rocks from a walk. A globe helps but is not needed.
No one ever looks at the Sun; its position is read from shadows and eclipses are modeled indoors. Night looks happen only with a grown-up from a known spot, the flashlight never goes in anyone's eyes, rocks are picked up only from a path or your own yard and hands are washed afterwards. Every hands-on activity carries a safety note.
Astronomy Year is the all-ages observation course: twelve sky missions outdoors. Earth and Space is the middle-school modeling and data course: it explains what Astronomy Year sees, with lamp-and-ball models, NASA data tables and Earth's rock record. Students go outside only to log the Moon's shape and the sunset position.
No. Everything is modeled with a lamp and a ball or read from NASA and United States Geological Survey tables. The Moon log needs only eyes and a pencil.