Description
What our Planets: Mercury lesson plan includes
Lesson Objectives and Overview: Planets: Mercury is a high-interest reading comprehension lesson plan. As such, students will practice various close reading and comprehension skills. In addition, they will learn about the closest planet to the sun. This lesson is for students in 3rd grade, 4th grade, and 5th grade.
Classroom Procedure
Every lesson plan provides you with a classroom procedure page that outlines a step-by-step guide to follow. You do not have to follow the guide exactly. The guide helps you organize the lesson and details when to hand out worksheets. It also lists information in the yellow box that you might find useful. You will find the lesson objectives, state standards, and number of class sessions the lesson should take to complete in this area. In addition, it describes the supplies you will need as well as what and how you need to prepare beforehand. The activity requires a number of supplies, including CDs, foam balls, and paperclips. You may want to cut the foam balls in half ahead of time.
Teacher Notes
The teacher notes page provides an extra paragraph of information to help guide the lesson and remind you what to focus on. It explains that you can teach this lesson in a whole-class setting or as an independent, small-group activity. The blank lines on this page are available for you to write out thoughts and ideas you have as you prepare the lesson.
PLANETS: MERCURY LESSON PLAN CONTENT PAGES
Introduction to Mercury
The Planets: Mercury lesson plan contains two content pages. Mercury is the smallest planet in our solar system and the closest to the sun. Scientists named it after the Roman messenger god Mercury, known for his speed. This name fits because Mercury moves quickly around the sun, completing one orbit in 88 Earth days! Even though it is close to Earth, it’s still about 48 million miles away at its nearest point. That’s like traveling around the Earth nearly 2,000 times!
Mercury looks very different from Earth. It’s a rocky planet with a surface covered in craters. Meteors crashed into the planet over billions of years, forming these craters. If you looked at Mercury, you’d see a grayish-brown color, similar to the Moon. It’s definitely not a big ball of gas like Jupiter or Saturn. Instead, it’s solid and full of rocks.
Moons and Temperature
One interesting thing about Mercury is that it has no moons. That’s right! While planets like Jupiter and Saturn have dozens of moons, Mercury has none. Scientists think this is because the planet is so close to the sun that the sun’s intense gravity might make it hard for Mercury to hold onto a moon.
Even though Mercury is the closest planet to the sun, it’s not the hottest planet in our solar system. Its thin atmosphere, called an exosphere, doesn’t have heat, so it cools off quickly when it’s not in sunlight.
Mercury’s day is also extraordinary. One day on Mercury (from one sunrise to the next) lasts about 176 Earth days! That means if you lived on Mercury, you could sit for a very long time to watch a sunrise or sunset. It also means a year is shorter than a day on this small planet.
Could there be life on Mercury? Probably not. Its surface is very harsh, with temperatures that can get extremely hot during the day and freezing cold at night. Any living thing on Mercury must survive temperatures of over 800°F during the day and 290°F below zero at night. That’s much too extreme for humans or the plants and animals that we know of!
Atmosphere and Geological Features
The weather on Mercury is unusual because the planet has almost no atmosphere. Without a thick layer of air to trap in heat, temperatures swing wildly. The planet doesn’t have storms like Earth, but the sunlight hitting its surface can make it blisteringly hot. Scientists use special tools on spacecraft, such as thermometers and cameras, to study Mercury’s weather. NASA’s Messenger spacecraft helped gather a lot of this information.
Mercury has some unique features that make it special. It has a colossal crater called the Caloris Basin that is about 960 miles wide. That’s almost the distance from New York City to Florida! Why is it there? The impact of a massive asteroid created the crater long ago. Mercury also has long cliffs, called scarps, that formed as the planet’s surface cooled and shrank over time.
A fun fact about this planet is that it has a magnetic field, but a very weak one. This is surprising because it’s so small and has cooled down over billions of years. In general, planets with magnetic fields usually have a molten core. Mercury’s size and temperature would suggest it has no magnetic field at all. But scientists think that its core might still be partly molten, despite its size. It’s Mercury’s mighty magnetic mystery!
Mercury is a fascinating planet with rocky surfaces, extreme temperatures, and a speedy orbit around the sun. Even though it doesn’t have moons or a chance for life as we know it, its unique features make it an exciting planet to study.
PLANETS: MERCURY LESSON PLAN WORKSHEETS
The Planets: Mercury lesson plan includes two worksheets: an activity worksheet and a practice worksheet. Each one will help students solidify their grasp of the material they learned throughout the lesson. You can refer to the classroom procedure guidelines to know when to hand out each worksheet.
STORY TIME ACTIVITY WORKSHEET
For the activity, students will use their creativity and knowledge of Mercury to finish a story. The worksheet provides three paragraphs. Students will then finish the story with a couple more paragraphs.
PLANETS: MERCURY REVIEW PRACTICE WORKSHEET
The practice worksheet lists 10 questions based on the content. These questions all relate to the content pages, so students will need to refer to them often for the answers. In addition, each question provides which reading tool the question corresponds to, such as text feature, vocabulary, or comprehension.
Worksheet Answer Keys
At the end of the lesson plan document is an answer key for the practice worksheet. The correct answers are all in red to make it easier for you to compare them with students’ responses. If you choose to administer the lesson pages to your students via PDF, you will need to save a new file that omits these pages. Otherwise, you can simply print out the applicable pages and keep these as reference for yourself when grading assignments.
