Celebrating Female Astronomers

August first is a day to honor women in astronomy, so it’s a great time to teach kids about the many female astronomers, computers and other experts who have shaped the way we see the universe.

I was trying to figure out if there’s a reason Women’s Astronomy Day is August 1, but the best I could come up with is that it’s the day German astronomer Caroline Hershel (1750 – 1848) discovered her first comet. She was known for discovering nebulas and comets, and has one named after her, 35P/Herschel-Rigollet. She was also the first woman to receive the Gold Medal of the Royal Astronomical Society.

I don’t know if that’s the reason, but we’ll call it that.

If you’re a little low on education in famous female astronomers yourself, I’m here to help. That information on Caroline Hershel came from ASTRON, the Netherlands Institute for Radio Astronomy, which has a page full of short bios of female astronomers you can check out.

Astronomy.com has a PDF you can download with stories about 10 female astronomers we all ought to know more about, from Katherine Johnson (known as one of the “Hidden Figures” who computed for NASA and was instrumental in calculating the trajectory for the first manned space flights) to Vera Rubin, who helped discover dark matter. It’s a little outdated but still good basic information to start with.

Or you can learn about Maria Mitchell, who discovered a comet in 1847 and was the first female member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, as well as the first astronomy professor at Vassar. She’s known as America’s first female astronomer, and the website for the Maria Mitchell Association has a great lesson plan and information for students wanting to learn more about her.

There’s also a lot of great information about the female astronomers of Harvard University from the late 1800s and early 1900s. Annie Cannon is one of the most well-known, as she catalogued more than 20,000 stars and her system of classification was adopted with few alterations by the International Astronomical Union in 1910. And Henrietta Leavitt discovered how to tell how far stars are from Earth based on their brightness.

For older students, choosing one of these scientists to learn more about would be fruitful and remind them that science has rarely been an exclusively male domain, we just don’t normally take the time to learn about the women who did much groundbreaking work. It’s time to change that!

[Photos: Katherine Johnson via NASA, Maria Mitchell via Maria Mitchell Association, Annie Cannon via Carleton.]

A classic manipulative in the preschool and early elementary classroom is the snap cube, also known as math cubes, unifix cubes or unit cubes. These little one inch cubes often come in a set of 100 in 10 different colors, and they snap together so they’re easy to use for all sorts of math learning, measuring and more.

No Time for Flashcards has a cute robot printable to use with cubes to measure the height of each robot. That one is free but they also have other printable cube mats that are a paid resource.

Catherine & Co uses math cubes to teach kids about measuring volume. They make a letter from cubes and then measure the volume (there’s a printable worksheet in the post).

Pattern recognition is another fun and easy activity you can do with the cubes. You can use printables like these from Planning Playtime, or just make a pattern from cubes and have kids repeat it or figure out what comes next. There’s another good set of pattern printables at English Created Resources.

Because there are 10 sets of 10 cubes in a pack, these are great for teaching one to one correspondence, counting, sorting and basic addition and subtraction. English Created Resources has great printable number mats you can use to form the number from cubes and count out the number of cubes that corresponds to that number.

ParenTutor has a great collection of snap cube activity ideas, most of which are just pictures, but it’s work taking a look through the post for ideas for using them at home or in the classroom.

To give just a few of their examples, you can match linked blocks to the corresponding number of pieces, use blocks to find different ways to add up to 10, compare numbers and determine which one is more or less, skip counting and weighing different numbers of blocks.

You can also use unit cubes to learn letters, like with these super cute alphabet mats from Fun Learning for Kids. Kids can trace the letter, make it out of cubes and practice writing a word that starts with that letter.

Of course you can also use them to build things, since they are blocks, and there are tons of pattern mats on Teachers Pay Teachers. I also love these dinosaur themed mats from Lets Go to Learn on Etsy.

Have you read?

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