Activities
A series of activities for children of various ages is being developed. Most of these depend on resources on the web and most use real data. At present, four have been completed. Most contain several parts that can be used separately as appropriate to the time available and the age of the students. A table relates these activities to the National Standards. Each activity also includes one or more additional pages. These explain the results and provide the results of  some of the necessary computations. The teacher should be familiar with these but can decide how much of the information to give the student in advance of trying the exercises.

The activities are as follows:

Telescopes
This activity has two purposes: an introduction to searching the Web for specific items and an illustration of how telescopes differ for different wavelengths. It can be used in a unit on electromagnetic radiation showing that X-rays, visible light, and radio waves are all the same kind of radiation with differing wavelengths and energies. The search of the web and the understanding that telescopes differ according to their use can be used with young children.

Sunrise and Sunset
This uses tables from the US Naval Observatory to demonstrate how the length of the day varies with season and geographic location. It also demonstrates that the dates of the earliest sunset and the latest sunrise differ by nearly a month. Finally, there is a fun exercise of finding the dates of the "blue" moons. This can be done as soon as a student can understand tables of numbers and plot a simple graph. Ability to subtract three digit numbers is also required. It can be used in a unit on time, on geography, or on the shape of the earth's orbit. A final exercise requires the understanding of proportion but can be done graphically.

Stellar temperatures
Spectral lines are identified in several stellar spectra, using a table of elements, wavelengths, and the energy levels of the lower level from which the radiation is absorbed the spectra are ordered by the temperature of the star. It is probably usable from grade 7 and up. It can be used in a unit on atomic structure, chemistry, light, or astronomy. There is also an exercise that mimics the acquisition of a stellar spectrum.

Nearby stars
This includes a number of parts ranging from making a model, that can be done by young students, to exercises that can be used in trigonometry. The latter can be done other ways. It can be used as a study of the neighborhood of the sun but also can form the introduction to a great deal of basic astronomical terms and concepts as well as an introduction to astronomical distance and time scales.