How do you explain the universe to a per/school child

[leon]

Hi Guys, is there any material around on how to explain the Universe to a pre/school child? :shrug:

I know it has to be simple, :) as my dear wife's eyebrows raise :rolleyes: when I talk of Astronomy related things to friends and family. :lol:

So how do we do this, any info would be much appreciated. :thumbsup:

Leon :thumbsup:

[julianh72]

In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth.
And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters.
And God said, Let there be light: and there was light.
And God saw the light, that it was good: and God divided the light from the darkness....

:D

[julianh72]

And when one of the kids asks "But who made God?", you can take a look at this site:

https://www.esa.int/esaKIDSen/SEMX4EBE8JG_OurUniverse_0.html

[strongmanmike]

Yeah I was giving young visitors to my observatory a sky tour Monday night and when I was explaining that the light from NGC 253 that was entering their eye had been travelling for 11.5 Million years to get to the eyepiece, one little girl, about 8years old, piped up and said "was that before baby Jesus?" and I said "oh yep, even before Adam and Eve!" she said "Woooow" :D

As for preschoolers ie under 5, I dunno :shrug: probably some quirky sand pit or lego analogy that will create a picture, I always like analogies to help explain concepts in astronomy, just need to pick the right one for the age, sex and the person.

Mike

[el_draco]

Where's my double barrel so I can SMITE THYNE ARSENAL!

Not even in jest!:screwy:

[el_draco]

Children that young don't need to know the detail. They can't comprehend numbers that big anymore than adults can.

I've always used a bit of "real world" comparison to make it easier. For example:

- If our sun was squished down to be the size of a basketball, then you would have to squish our world down to a pea and you can compare the other planets the same way.

- The rest is about how things go together; planets spin around the sun and every time you have a birthday, you have gone around the sun once. The earth takes a whole day to spin just once.. ooh ah !

- The sun is in a galaxy made up of lots of stars and its so big, the last trip the sun took around it took longer than the dinosaurs were around!

- There are more galaxies than you could ever count...

- The stars are so far away that you could fly a rocket until you were an old man/lady and still not get to the closest one.

That's about the limit of comprehension until children get to high school. It works pretty well in my experience and, when you get a brighter spark, you can extend it a bit further.

[pmrid]

The question was how to explain the universe, not how to conceal it behind mumbo jumbo.

Peter

[leon]

Interesting answers, and yes Peter I agree, :rolleyes: thank you all for your responses :thumbsup:

Leon :thumbsup:

[clive milne]

In a word..
'Big'

[Wavytone]

LOL... Interesting question Alex, I can see I'm going to have to explain this to Lachlan one day soon.

Grains of sand in the sandpit as the stars in our galaxy. There are little sandpits, big sandpits and then beaches, and even sandy deserts like the Sahara or the Gobi desert, which are just very big sandpits !

Then all the sandpits and beaches across Sydney, and the rest of the world make up the sandiverse...

[casstony]

Over millions of years, a giant cloud of dust and gas in space clumps together to make the Sun and planets. Millions of years later plants grow then animals and people.
So the stars, planets, plants and animals are all made from the same little particles that were in that cloud of dust, and over time nature makes more and more complicated things like people.

Then answer any questions they ask.

[dylan_odonnell]

I do a bit of outreach and have young kids too. At preschool age I feel they are still only just comprehending the earth as a sphere.

They are interested to hear about the orbits of the earth, moon and sun as these are tangible things they can see and feel. But deep space can be a bit abstract for them. They can understand stars a bit via comparison to Sol but the scales are lost on them.

I like to tell them about how stars are made with nebula photos but you can't really use the term "star nurseries" or "where stars are born" because they don't really know what birth is (and you don't want to have to explain that!)

Anecdotally kids are most interested to hear about aliens, space travel and black holes. These are the "fun" topics for them and I get peppered with questions about them every time. This is what they get exposed to most via fiction/kids books/tv I guess.

Hope this helps, sorry I don't have any resources, I just wing it!

d

[xelasnave]

The Sun is a long way off.
It takes light 8 minutes to get here from the Sun.
Light travels fast, so fast that if you were in a rocket going around the Earth you would go around 7 times in one second, so fast it would be hard to count as you go by (1234567 counted as fast as I can while pointing up)
We live in a very large group of stars called a gallaxy, its called the milky way, and has over 100 billion stars maybe as many as 300 billion and remember a billion is a thousand million. Our Sun is a star so its a star you can see in daytime.
There are many more galaxies than there are grains of sand on all the beaches on Earth... Billions and billions.
There is a photo taken by the Hubble Space Telescope showing over 2500 galaxies in the darkest part of the sky. If you hold a grain of sand at arms length that grain of sand will hide those 2500 galaxies and everywhere you hold that grain of sand you know behind it are at least 2500 galaxies.
Each galaxy will be about 2 million light years from it neighbour.
Our neighbour galaxy is that far away and you can actually see it with your own eyes so if anyone asks how good you can see tell them you can see something 2 million lights years away.
I stop there because that's all I know.
Alex

[leon]

Nice one Alex, thank You.

Leon

[sil]

I'd like to see physicists give their definition of "universe" before talking about it. Some talk about "everything", others talk in terms of a "region", or even an "observable region" that could be travelled to by a spaceship.

I don't like to see people dumbing down answers for children, they will absorb the information and in their minds become "truth". Give them as detailed and honest explanation as you can is my suggestion. Treat them like an adult and they learn to be adult about it all. If YOU don't know, tell them that, dont pretend you know everthing, they shouldnt treat ignorance as a negative, you might be able to encourage them to find the answer themselves or maybe the could grow to become the person who answers a question for all humanity. When you treat children as children they only learn to be a child, my experience is honesty and accuracy are key.

Of course be sensible about it, I'm not saying give them general relativity equations as answers, just give them as much detail as you can to try to answer the question. Doesnt have to be "fun" just dont be stupid about it. If they ask more questions then thats great, they're listening at least and somewhat interested hopefully. Bit by bit they'll learn and put together their own internal framework to make it fit and comprehendable to them. Test them on things too later on to help reinforce what they learnt or correct it if they misunderstood parts. It also helps their brains form the proper neural connections for good learning and comprehension even if the details get forgetten with time. Be helpful and interested in giving an answer so they pick up that the answer is important from your body language and attitude, that way I find they will pay more attention because you take it serious.

[xelasnave]

I liked all of your post and agree with your approach to talking to and informing children.
There are two universes....the observable universe and by its definition one can correctly claim to be at its center.
However there is the "whole" universe which includes that which is beyond our observable universe sadly one can not then claim to be at the center.
I think a child could be told this way.
We can see a certain part of the universe but some stuff is so far away we can't see it even with our most powerful scopes and never will.

I talked to my daughter every day and explained things simply.
When she could barely talk she understood how the fire truck was a big tank with a pump and could point to the tank bit and the pump.

The idea is to reduce the complexity.
She did not need to know how the pump worked.
I showed her my small fire pump and she understood water in water out.

Same with a motor she understood petrol went in there burnt in there and pushed a pedal like on her bike. There burnt petrol came out here.

A bit sloppy but finally less of a mystery for her.

Unfortunately these days she knows everything but to her credit is always right.
Not is a smart rrrrs way.
But I am sure her thinking ability and expression can be traced to those early years where I took the time to explain in the simplest but truethful manner I could present.
She can name many galaxies by sight but has no interest in astronomy.
But I have heard her explain, as above, the universe to other kids and adults.
Alex

[OICURMT]

Man made god in his own image so that he could say that god made man is his own image...

Lather, rinse, repeat...

[sil]

I suppose I should have qualified my statement with my understanding of the "universe". To me its always meant "everything" and you could physically travel to it all though practicalities mean it probably couldn't be done. Just like its possible to walk from Sydney to the North Pole. In practice you need to account for the distance, temperature changes, weather, breathing underwater, etc so in practice nobodoy would bother to try it because of cost and practicality but its NOT impossible. Likewise you could jump in a space shuttle point it to the third star on the left and fly towards it, eventually you'll start to see new stars that couldn't be seen from earth, these are still in "this universe" not a neighbouring or parallel one. As for size I think the "empty vaccum" is probably infinite in all directions and I used to think no matter how far you travelled it would always look pretty much the same, ie black with points of light everywhere, with smaller interesting patches of nebula and solar systems and galaxies. Now I'm unsure about that I could see it as being infinite vacuum with regions of points of light where matter has been created "so the "observable universe" might be a finite region but the use of the word universe there is inappropriate. In practice travelling to the edge of the finite region where matter exists may be impractical to ever achieve
unless maybe those Von Neumann probes (sp?) but I dont see infinite travel along a straight line in space as a physical impossibility. So none of the above needs exotic theories or technologies for a species to achieve, during individual lifetimes of our species no we need something more in terms of technology and committment.

I also feel that the laws of physics (matter and energy) have to be identical everywhere in our infinite universe.

Maybe we need (or do we have) more precise terms ? eg Universe = the vacuum region we call space; matterverse = a region inside the universe where matter exists. So in my view we live inside a matterverse within the universe and there could be other matterverses too which could be reached and may have formed in isolation from ours by a similar or different mechanism. Thinking wider in these terms. Energy within the universe exists and cant be uniform, so energy densities differs, from those we eventually get matter condensing out and eventually as the matter cools we have heat death where the energy is just dissolved back to the universe where it may re-condense as matter, Rinse and repeat.

I may have gone off topic.

Maybe "it was god" is the easiest answer after all, though I did come up with a theory that showed time travel existed because the bible existed. Annoyed me because I can't disprove it either.

Wandring again. Back on topic: "yay education", "yay kids" :)

[xelasnave]

As there is no outside our universe can we say we are inside?
It is thought the universe is infinite which is a difficult concept for mere mortals.
Infinite means unlimited zillions of everything and opens the prospect of infinite replication of everything even us.
Funny the kids I have mentioned that to seem to have no difficulty is grasping such an extreme notion, I guess the primer in fairy tales helps.
Time will work against you as gsr as travelled is concerned.
I think the observable universe is out to 48 billion light years which is hard to explain when it is apparently under 14 billion years old.
Enter inflation which explains how it grew faster than the speed of light.
Explaining inflation is hard, more so for me because I feel they have that part wrong.
But I can sort of explain what the model says.
Started as a pimple and grew from so small to everything in under a second.
I find that difficult to accept without writing God into the model..maybe that is what we are to do.
So if you wanted to travel across the universe at the speed of light it could take 100 billion years from on side of the observable universe to the other and given to travel at light speed you would need ever joule of energy in the universe you can pit it in the impossible basket.
And say we could go at 100 times light speed that won't fit into a life span or the duration of time a species gets to exist in time.
But we ignore those things with star trek etc where flitting from galaxy to galaxy is like jetting OS.
It's big ..bigger than you can imagine.. Try mentally and you will fall asleep..its better than counting sheep because you can never arrive at the edge..because there is no edge... No outside ever
.
Alex

[sil]

If there is no outside I don't think you can say there is an inside, dosn't confused the concepts of solid and hollow objects for the kids? Maybe better to consider the universe as an empty solid, so we are the "part" of the universe, not inside or outside. maybe a jar of water and teaspoon of oil could be used to demonstrate the empty space is like the water in the jar (universe) and stars and planets the balls of oil. Ah says little Johnnie "but the jar has and outside" so you imagine a swimming pool and a bucket of oil, and when he talks about tiles ask him if he's been to the beach :) It is a tricky concept and there are logic problems everywhere. Maybe we need magic where we can summon a small ball full of dots and you move your hands apart and the ball grows.

Observable universe = 48 BLY? Age = 14 BLY? Shouldnt this be around the other way, that would explain difficulties explaining.
I thought around 14 BLY is as far as we've observed so in that time (14billion years) the region will have expanded out to about 48 BLY in size.

Space is Big, Really really big, You may think its a long way down the road to the chemist but thats peanuts compared to space.

I'm happy with Douglas Adams' explanation :)

[Pharian]

Ha! Was about to quote the Addams when I saw you already had. So I thought to myself "don't panic!", then wrapped my towel around my head to soften the blow of the imminent gold brick from the pan galactic gargle blaster I was swilling. Good times...

[silv]

For 13 billion years, a balloon has been blown up and still is.
It's gotten soo big now that we can't visit any other interesting places with our fuelled space rockets for we'd simply die of old age on the way.
And it get'sbigger every day. That's why people are looking for other means to go visit other places in the universe.

And what's at the end of the universe?
Well, it's not only a room full of stars with a wall around it, you know.

It's a time full of stars. And at the end of time, time hasn't happened yet.
Until tomorrow.
And the next day.
No need for a wall when there's no time, see?
Time creates space.