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Course: 2nd grade reading & vocabulary > Unit 2
Lesson 1: Building knowledgeWelcome to this unit about the moon!
Have you ever looked up at the night sky and wondered about the moon? How does it work? What is it like to visit? What is it made out of? People have been watching, learning, and writing about the moon for thousands of years. This unit will answer some of these questions about the moon, and maybe get you to start asking your own questions too.
In this unit, you will:
- Learn about the moon and how it works
- Read about characters that also wonder about the moon
- Find out how the moon affects the earth
By:
- Watching videos to help you understand what good readers and writers do
- Reading and answering questions about literary and informational texts
- Learning new academic words
In order to answer the essential question: How do we tell fact from fiction?
Want to join the conversation?
- How was the moon created?(1 vote)
- The most widely accepted theory of how the moon was born is called the giant impact hypothesis. It suggests that about 4.5 billion years ago, a planet-sized object called Theia collided with Earth and threw a lot of material into space. Some of this material came together by gravity and formed the moon. The moon is mostly made of lighter elements from Earth’s crust and has a similar composition to Earth.(1 vote)
- Why can't we see the moon when it's daytime?(1 vote)
- We can see the moon during the day because it reflects sunlight, and it is bright enough to overcome the scattered light from the sun in our atmosphere. However, we can’t see the moon when it is between the sun and Earth (new moon phase) because the side of the moon that is lit by the sun is facing away from us. As the moon moves around Earth, we can see more or less of its sunlit side depending on its position.(1 vote)
- How is the moon still in the sky when it is day?(19 votes)
- The moon is still in the sky, it just isn't in the part of the sky that we see. When it becomes day, a different part of the Earth is rotated so that it is able to see the moon, and it is night for them.(25 votes)
- Why does the moon have different colors?(17 votes)
- The light and dark coloring on the moon is two different types of rock. The highlands of the moon, called terrae, Latin for land, is the lighter shade you see, and is mostly feldspar. the dark areas of the moon are called maria, which is Latin for sea. It was named this because when people first saw it, they believed it to me lunar oceans. we now know that it is dried up magma, from when our moon was still geologically active, it is mostly made of basalt, and is much younger than the highland areas, which we know because there are fewer craters in these areas.(1 vote)
- How big is the moon?(12 votes)
- The moon has a radius of about 1,079 miles, which is about a quarter of Earth's radius. The moon's volume is 1/50th the size of the Earth.(14 votes)
- How long does it take for it to be a full moon?(9 votes)
- After you see a full moon, it will take one lunar cycle, around 29.5 days, to see the next full moon.(19 votes)
- How many moons are in the milkyway galaxy?(9 votes)
- There's not a total count of moons in the entire Milky Way galaxy, but in our solar system alone there are currently 293 moons.
Learn more here: https://science.nasa.gov/solar-system/moons/(1 vote)
- How close is the moon to the earth?(9 votes)
- It's about 238,900 miles.That's so far away right?(8 votes)
- Why does the moon have craters? What reason and why?(4 votes)
- The moon has craters because other rocks from space impact the moon, and the moon has no atmosphere, so asteroids impacted it easily.(3 votes)
- Why is the moon bright?(2 votes)
- The moon is bright because light from the sun reflects onto its surface.(2 votes)