Tag Archives: Earth

I Spy the Transit of Venus!

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Greetings Friends!

Your favorite blogger from Tiny Planets here to share some awesome pictures from this week. Many of you may know that the Transit of Venus took place earlier. What does this mean? Well, even I had to look that one up and ask my dear friends Bing and Bong. They showed me this awesome video by our friends at NASA:

The Transit of Venus occurs when the planet of Venus passes right between the Sun and planet Earth. When all you dears living on Earth looked up at the Sun, you would have seen a black ball passing directly across the face of the Sun. Actually, you would have needed some special glasses to do that because we all know how dangerous it is to look directly at the Sun — don’t do it!

Anyway, the reason this whole thing is so exciting is because occurs in pairs 8 years apart every 243 years. So basically we will never see something like this until 2255! I hope you didn’t miss it, but incase you did, here is a picture to show you what it looked like:

Look at how Venus passed by the sun in 2004 and then a few days ago in 2012.

Enjoy the world around you — especially these moments of a lifetime!

Signing out, Halley

Your Tiny Planet: Solar Energy

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Bing Waves his handBing here — you know that we have lots of tiny planets to watch over. You’re lucky — you only have to take care of your tiny planet, also known as the Earth. The Earth is a very busy place with so much to see and learn.

To help us learn about the Earth we decided to ask  Robert “The Happy Scientist” Krampf  to be our guide. Since this month we’re learning about the Sun, The Happy Scientist is going to explain just how we use solar power to create electricity for our homes.

 

 

The Happy Scientist

Preschool Science: Introducing The Compass

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Detailed CompassCompasses are included in all sorts of play sets as props for camping and exploring adventures for little kids. What you may not have realized is that these “toys” give us parents a great way to introduce children to one of the natural forces of our world – magnetism.

Using handy items from home, here’s an activity to help children learn the compass points (north, south, east, west), and understand that some things in our world and consistent and predictable — the needle of the compass will always point north. Continue reading →

Earth: The Biggest Magnet in the World

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Earth is the biggest magnet that we can reach out and touch. It’s also one of the five planets in our solar system that has a magnetic field (the other four are Neptune, Jupiter, Uranus and Saturn).

Just like the little handheld magnets we buy in a store, the Earth has two poles North and South.

The two ends of a magnet are called poles. Magnets can be used as powerful tools because two north-seeking, or two south-seeking poles of a magnet will repel each other. While a north-seeking and south- seeking pole will always attract each other.

So now it’s time to prove (or disprove)  that the Earth is really a magnet. The only way to know is to do a little experiment and see what happens. In this experiment we’re going to make ourselves a compass and see what happens.

Continue reading →