Launch!

We launched our unit right after spring break and it was so neat to see it inspired by an event that was pretty close to Mrs. Brinza's heart.

Moving to Colorado from Chicago, Mrs. Brinza's newsfeed on social media is still connected there.  And on March 20th, right at the start of spring break, there was an event called Chicagohenge, which looked like this!

And with a little digging, an event like this occurs in other places, like in Manhattan, NY in May.

It was so neat to see that at a couple times of a year, the sun sets PERFECTLY in between buildings in each of these locations.  So many people are connected to this event, that it made us realize that not only are we connected to patterns that happen in the sky, but people from other cultures have been for years, too!   We listened to podcasts from various cultures to realize that they're connected to the sky because of patterns they see with the sun, with the moon, with populations of organisms, and even the stars in the nighttime sky.

Students shared out their own connections to the sky and space, coming up with these related phenomena:

We realized that regardless of the event we felt connected to in the sky or the podcast we listened to, there were patterns happening in the sky that we agreed upon.  Check out our first consensus model:

So many questions about all these events surfaced, and we built our Driving Question Board:

From all our questions, we even came up with investigation ideas we could do (can you tell these 8th graders are getting a little "is-it-the-end-of-the-year-icitis?!?!" by some of the silly investigation ideas they came up with!?!?!)

So many great ideas here!  Where do we begin!