Middle School Inquiry Lab on Galaxies
In this lab students will sort different galaxies based on the three types: spiral/disk galaxies, elliptical galaxies, and irregular galaxies.
Each inquiry lab will contain an essential question that will drive the lesson and make students think. For this lesson, the essential question is:
- Can you describe the three main types of galaxies in the universe?
BACKGROUND INFORMATION AND MATERIALS LIST:
Students will begin the lab by reading the essential question and background information. This can be done individually, as lab groups, or as a whole class. If you consider lab groups, you also might include some type of whole class formative checks before digging into the lab.
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Materials List:
- galaxy cards
- category cards
PROCEDURE:
For this lab, students are going to take cards of various galaxies and try to classify them based on their shape. Students will then analyze how many of each there are, and which shape is the most common.
CHECK FOR UNDERSTANDING:
At this point in the lab, students will be checked for understanding by answering questions about their findings. Here are a few that come with the lab:
- Why was Edwin Hubble so influential?
- Explain the three types of galaxies in one sentence each.
CONCLUSION
Students will go back to the essential question and write a CER (Claim, Evidence, Reasoning) to conclude the lab. Once completed, students will reflect back on their learning by answering the following questions:
- What makes irregular galaxies so different from other types of galaxies?
- Because we are inside our galaxy, the Milky Way, we cannot take a picture of it. Think of some ways we can tell what shape our galaxy is.
MODIFIED AND INDEPENDENT INQUIRY VERSIONS
All of the Kesler Science inquiry labs come with three different modification levels. Each lab is differentiated using the icons below.
STANDARDS ALIGNMENT
TEKS: 8.8B – Recognize that the Sun is a medium-sized star near the edge of a disc-shaped galaxy of stars and that the Sun is many thousands of times closer to Earth than any other star.
