Year 3 Earth and Space Sciences Resources

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Unless otherwise specified, these resources are published under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported licence. You are free to reproduce and distribute these posters for non-commercial purposes but not to modify it in any way without permission from the author. Full licence conditions at http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/.

Night and day on the Moon

Have your students use a chart to record the changing appearance of the Moon. Ask students to record the appearance of the Moon by shading the unlit part of the disc. You can extend the activity by asking them to record the Moons appearance at the same time each night (as evening twilight ends). With prompting, they will notice that the Moon moves across the sky. This is caused by the Moon moving in its orbit around the Earth. The charts are located on the ‘2022 Events and Planet Finder Charts‘ pages.

Sun, Earth and Moon scale poster

Download and display this poster to amaze your students with just how large the Sun is compared to the Earth and Moon.

This link downloads the A3 sized Adobe Acrobat version of the poster: Sun_Earth_Moon_scale poster

Make a Southern Cross finder

Using this resource with your students would also be an ideal way of demonstrating one of the effects of the ‘Earth’s rotation on its axis’ (quote from The Australian Curriculum, Science / Year 3 / Science Understanding / Earth and space sciences (ACSSU048))). The reason that the stars of the Southern Cross appear to rotate in the sky is that the Earth is rotating.

Use the below link to download the resource.

Go here to download the resource.

Scale model of the Sun, Earth and Moon

Space is big! Just how big is difficult to comprehend. One starting point on the journey to attempt to understand how big space is is to look at the distance between the Sun, the Earth and Moon. If you have a few spare minutes, a 25 meter measuring tape and access to a printer (to print two A4 pages) you can make your own simplified model of the Sun, the Earth and Moon.

Using this resource with your students would allow you to achieve part of one of the following elaborations from either the Year 3 or the Year 5 The Australian Curriculum, Science / Science Understanding / Earth and space science content areas. Go here to download the resource.