When the Sun Knocks Out Radio

Can the Sun break your radio from 93 million miles away? This one-page activity uses a real, current event - the strongest solar flare of 2025 - to make electromagnetic waves concrete. A solar flare sends light and X-rays across empty space with no medium, reaching Earth in about 8 minutes and knocking out radio signals across whole continents, while lighting up auroras far to the south.

What's Included

• 1 student page: a short news story plus four cards (What's the Story? multiple choice with a quick true/false, a fill-in chain with word bank, Cause & Effect matching, and a Why Does It Matter? sentence starter)
• 1 teacher key page with every answer, a sample response, the standards box, clickable links to the source articles, and a science-connection summary
• Letter-size PDF, no prep

How It Helps You Teach

• Shows electromagnetic waves crossing empty space, the hardest idea to picture
• Anchors real-world waves in a current, dramatic event
• The article links support media literacy and let you show students the source

Pair It With

Part of a Waves in the Real World set: Context Clues, Inferences, Science in the News, the Mechanical or Electromagnetic? sort, and a Reading in Science. Check out our library for the rest.

Perfect for 6th grade physical science, a current-events science reading and reading comprehension activity, science literacy, and TEKS 6.8C review. Topics include: solar flare, electromagnetic waves, light, X-rays, radio, and space weather.

Standards: TEKS 6.8C; NGSS DCI PS4.B (Electromagnetic Radiation). Part of the Daily Science series by Workybooks