A difficult concept for students is that the stars they see in the sky are from the past. The star we see is not the star it is right now. We could be looking at the light of a star that could have burnt out billions of years ago, but it appears to be shining bright to us on Earth. This mind-blowing fact is attributed to the fact that light, while the fastest thing we know of, still has a tremendous amount of space to travel before reaching us. We are not even sure how big our universe is (but we have estimates) because we cannot see all of it because the light from those regions still has not hit Earth! We estimate that the universe is 100 billion light years in diameter by looking at the expansion rate, and we think the edge of the universe is about 46.5 billion light years away! These are tough numbers to grasp fully.

This lesson aims to introduce to the students that the light we see from many stars is actually from a long time ago. Using a game that resembles a telephone mixed with charades, we hope to make this hard-to-grasp concept more accessible to the students as they travel from a star to the Earth.

Materials: 

·      A large playing area (gym or outside)

·      Lots of rubber disc dots

·      A cone or ball per team (You can also use models of the Earth and a star like a sun if you have them available)

Minimum Number of Students Needed: You could play this game with as few as five people. If you have more, you can make teams that "race" each other.

Age: Possibly lower elementary, but undoubtedly upper elementary and older