Today is our qualifying round for the Spelling Bee on Friday. We will select five students from the class to join with the five students from Ms. Starks class. We had lots of things happening yesterday. Poetry in particular is a big push right now as we try to finish all our poems by Friday. We also had our part yesterday to celebrate how hard the students have been working. It was a good time had by all.

Some really great news popped up yesterday. It was funny, but just after I wrote about the new space program coming out in late May; lo and behold, if it doesn’t pop up ready to be downloaded yesterday. I am very excited. My wife says I’m like a boy in a candy shop. Anyway, the program looks brilliant and I am going to download at school as soon as I get there. The site is called WWTelescope and it comes to use from Microsoft. It’s also free!

Here is a new program that is coming out that looks really cool. Keep an eye out for it!

WWTelescope Headed for Late May Launch

May 09, 2008 | by Nick Mokey

Microsoft’s Google Sky competitor, dubbed WorldWide Telescope, is almost ready for release, according to Bill Gates.

Google Sky may be widely credited with pushing stargazing software beyond astronomy geeks and into the mainstream, but Microsoft hopes to improve on Google’s formula with its own free celestial application, WorldWide Telescope. Bill Gates spoke more about the upcoming release and gave a more definite release date at a speech in Jakarta, Indonesia, on Friday.

According to PCWorld, Gates told audiences that Google Sky would launch at the end of May, staying within the spring 2008 time period promised on Microsoft’s prelaunch page. In his address, Gates was especially proud of the Microsoft Visual Experience Engine that will power WW Telescope, compiling terabytes worth of data into a seamless view of the night sky. “This is taking data that’s very complex, gathered over many years from many telescopes, and making it accessible,” he said.

Gates was in Indonesia for the Government Leader Forum – Asia, where he also announced a handful of education programs Microsoft would participate in to help deliver technology and education to those in less developed countries.

source: http://news.digitaltrends.com/news-article/16650/wwtelescope-headed-for-late-may-launch

Here is a video about the program:

Here is a nice video from Bill Nye the Science Guy. I have always enjoyed him and he gives a great explanation as to why Pluto should not be considered a planet anymore.

The grade 3’s began their space unit today. They started with a very exciting activity: a quiz! Actually, it was only a questionnaire. I handed it out to students so that we could begin to see what sort of things they already know about this thing we call space and whether the things they know are actually accurate. This idea might be a good conversation starter for you with your child. For example, one of the questions on the questionnaire was: “Why does the sun look the same size as the moon? Explain your answer and describe the size of each and their distance from us.”

I also got a chance to show the students a number of the websites and programs we will be using as a class. I mentioned this to them as they might like to download or bookmark the sites themselves. All the programs and sites are free to use. I will also try to put them on the links part of the page but I can so far only put so many sites as it is limited to only ten. Here is the list:

Celestia – http://www.shatters.net/celestia/index.html

Premier Planets – http://www.premierplanets.com/

Interactive Universe

http://www.history.com/genericContent.do?id=54499

SkyOrb – http://www.realtech-vr.com/skyorb/download.html

Stellarium – http://www.stellarium.org/

Wikisky – http://www.wikisky.org/

Virtual Journey – http://library.thinkquest.org/28327/main/cockpit.html

Interactive Space – http://science.nationalgeographic.com/science/space/solar-system

Download some of them and spend some time with your child enjoying the awesome wonder that is our Universe!