Description
What our Planets: Saturn lesson plan includes
Lesson Objectives and Overview: Planets: Saturn 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 this large and interesting planet in our solar system. 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: SATURN LESSON PLAN CONTENT PAGES
Introduction to Saturn
The Planets: Saturn lesson plan contains three content pages. Saturn is one of the most striking planets in our solar system. It was named after the Roman god of agriculture, who was the father of the Roman god, Jupiter. As you know, Jupiter is the name of another planet in our solar system! Saturn is the sixth planet from the sun. It is about 890 million miles away from Earth. That’s so far away that even light takes over an hour to travel from Saturn to us. Scientists study this planet to learn more about what makes it unique.
This massive planet looks like a giant ball of gas with soft yellow, gold, and white colors swirling around. It doesn’t have a hard, rocky surface like Earth. Instead, it’s mostly made up of hydrogen and helium gas, the same elements that compose stars. Similar to Jupiter, Saturn’s atmosphere has bands of clouds that give it a striped look. But they are not as bright as Jupiter’s clouds.
Moons and Temperature
Saturn has at least 145 moons! Some of the most famous ones are Titan, Enceladus, and Rhea. Titan is the largest moon and is bigger than the planet Mercury! It has rivers and lakes made of liquid methane instead of water. Enceladus is another fascinating moon because it sprays icy water into space from underground oceans.
While Saturn itself is not a good place for life because of its poisonous gases and extreme conditions, some of its moons look more promising. For example, Enceladus and Titan both have what scientists think could be ingredients for life, like water and certain chemicals. If life exists there, it might look very different from what we know—tiny microbes that can survive in extreme cold.
The weather on Saturn is wild and intense! Massive storms with powerful winds race through its atmosphere. One storm, called the Great White Spot, was as big as Earth! The winds on Saturn can blow up to 1,100 miles per hour, nearly five times faster than the strongest hurricane or tornadoes on Earth.
Atmosphere and Geological Features
Saturn has a hexagon-shaped storm at its north pole. This storm is shaped like a giant, six-sided polygon, and scientists still aren’t sure how it formed. The storm is enormous—it’s about 20,000 miles wide! It’s one of Saturn’s most unique and mysterious features, and no other planet in the solar system has anything like it. The storm has been captured in incredible images and continues to amaze scientists with its strange shape and powerful winds.
Scientists study Saturn’s storms with special spacecraft. Voyager and Cassini have flown to the planet to take pictures and send data back to Earth. These spacecraft carried cameras, spectrometers, and other tools that let scientists see what Saturn is made of and what its weather is like. The information helps them understand how planets form and what might exist in our universe. Saturn’s moons, especially Titan and Enceladus, might even teach
us about the possibility of life elsewhere.
Saturn’s most famous feature is its rings. They shine brightly because they reflect sunlight. But the rings are not solid. They are made up of billions of small pieces of ice and rock, some as tiny as grains of sand and others as big as houses! These pieces move around the planet in various changing as the ice and rocks collide. Some parts of the rings are missing because the planet’s moons pull the material away with their gravity.
This planet also has very low density. If you could find a bathtub big enough to hold the planet, it would just float on the water! A day on Saturn is also very short. It spins so fast that one day lasts only about 10.5 Earth hours. However, because it’s so far from the sun, one year on Saturn equals about 29.5 Earth years. 10Saturn is an extraordinary planet with beautiful rings, many moons, and extreme weather. It’s a gas giant that contains space, inspiring us to learn more about the universe we live in.
PLANETS: SATURN LESSON PLAN WORKSHEETS
The Planets: Saturn 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.
SATURN MODEL ACTIVITY WORKSHEET
For the activity, students will create a model of Saturn using the materials you provide. All the steps they need to follow are on the worksheet. At the end, after students finish their models, they will answer and discuss the reflection questions at the bottom of the page.
PLANETS: SATURN 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.
