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Moon Phase as a Context for Teaching Scale Factor

Science Scope—December 2007

The Sun and the Moon are our most visible neighbors in space, yet their distance and size relative to the Earth are often misunderstood. Science textbooks fuel this misconception because they regularly depict linear images of Moon phases without respect to the actual sizes of the Sun, Earth, and Moon, nor their correlated distances from one another. This integrated lesson is designed to help students communicate their ideas of the relative sizes and distances of the Sun, Earth, and Moon, and to construct appropriate understandings of how scaling factors can be used to make representations of astronomical distances.
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