For teachers

A free, ad-free, account-free astronomy site that runs offline from a USB stick, in eleven languages, with printable sheets. Here is what is on it and which lesson each part fits.

What it is

AstroKids is built for children of about 6 to 10. It has four parts: a zoomable model of everything from a moon out to the galaxies; a planetarium that computes the real sky for your school's location and any date; a set of explanation pages showing how each distance was actually measured; and printable activity sheets.

Fitting it to a lesson

• The solar system — the eight planets, the belts, and why the gap between them matters
• The Milky Way — why our own galaxy looks like a band and not a spiral
• Galaxies — the shapes, and what each shape tells you
• The universe — scale, the Big Bang, and what is unknown
• Everything we can actually observe — sorted by what equipment it needs — useful for setting expectations
• Every kind of object there is — a taxonomy table, generated from the database

The strongest part, for teaching

The explanation pages. Astronomy for this age group is usually a list of facts to accept; these pages are seven measurements a child can partly repeat, each one standing on the one before. Eratosthenes with a stick. The Moon's size from the curve of a shadow. Kepler's ellipse with two pins and a loop of string. Every one of them ends in something to go and try.

• How big is the Earth? — a stick, a shadow, and two towns — repeatable with a partner school
• The size and distance of the Moon — a hole punched in card
• The shape of the solar system — two pins, a string, and a check against real orbital periods
• The distance to the Sun — deliberately fails first — which is the lesson
• The whole ladder — all nineteen explanation pages

Printables

Observation logs, colouring sheets and cut-out models, in every language the site ships. The observation sheets are designed to be filled in outdoors and kept — the paper you are holding afterwards is the point.

Languages

The interface and the activities are translated into English, Czech, German, French, Polish, Ukrainian, Spanish, Romanian, Turkish, Portuguese and Japanese. The object descriptions follow language by language: English and Czech so far.

If you take a class outside

The Planetarium will plan a session for your school's coordinates and a chosen date: what is above the horizon, in what order it sets, and when it is actually dark enough. Two objects is a good night for a group.