Sequence of activities:

What do we know about Jupiter? (5 minutes)

Discuss Jupiter and share the following facts:

• It’s the fifth planet from the Sun and the largest planet within the Solar System
• It is a gas giant with mass one-thousandth that of the Sun but is two and a half times the mass of all the other planets in our Solar System combined.
• Jupiter is known as a gas giant along with Saturn, Uranus and Neptune.
• Galileo discovered Jupiter's four large moons — Io, Europa, Ganymede and Callisto, now known as the Galilean moons.

Let’s watch this video that National Geographic produced to give us a sense of what goes on on Jupiter (3 minutes)

After watching the video, ask:

• Write down all the things you remember about Jupiter from this video.
• How does Jupiter look?
• What are the weather patterns and environmental factors on Jupiter?
• Would you want to live on Jupiter? Why or why not?
• How many moons are there on Jupiter?

One way to write poems about Jupiter is to do an ACROSTIC POEM.  What’s an ACROSTIC POEM you ask? (5 minutes)

An acrostic poem is one in which a word or phrase is spelled out vertically using a letter from each line. Typically, an acrostic will use the first letter of each line to spell a vertical word or phrase. More advanced acrostics use the last letter of each line or a letter in the middle of the line to spell the vertical word or phrase.

Here’s an example:

Give the students 20 minutes to compose an ACROSTIC POEM. If they finish early, ask them to write another ACROSTIC POEM about one of Jupiter’s moons.

The last 5 minutes of class should be reserved for students to share their poems and read them out loud.