First grade students have recently begun learning about different types of energy. The first type we are exploring is solar power.
Solar energy is simply energy from the sun. It is a renewable energy resource and as long as the sun shines, we will have energy on Earth! First graders learned about how it takes the sun’s light energy 8 minutes to reach the Earth and how that energy travels 186,000 miles per second. Knowing that the sun has endless amounts of energy, first grade students start to wonder, “Why doesn’t everything use solar energy”
This led us into learning about solar panels and how we use them. Solar panels are used to gather sunlight and change it into electricity. Although some forms of solar panels can be cheap, such as garden solar lights, it can also be very expensive to use solar energy to power buildings and cars.
To demonstrate the power of the sun, students explored solar-activated paper. Students found very small objects from the backyard to lay on the paper to block the sun. Students made predictions of what they thought would happen to the paper when when we exposed the it to the sun with their objects on top. Then the real fun began!
Our paper started out blue, gradually turned white in the sun, and then turned to a darker blue after being rinsed with cold water. When we were finished, the sun had changed the color of the paper, and the spots where the objects had been sitting remained the lighter blue color. Tomorrow, students will write about their observations with our solar paper and why they thought it had happened.
