One More Week of Space!

We love outer space so much we had to spend another week talking all about it! I really could tell that an extra week helped my munchkins wrap their minds around the amazing idea of space, planets and stars.

Although our school was closed to celebrate Memorial Day, we got right back to work on Tuesday! We began by talking more in depth on the phases of the moon. We explored the idea of how the moon orbits around our earth and because it travels around, sometimes the sun lights up more of it and sometimes it lights up less.

To explore the vocabulary of the different types of moons, we used cookies! We explored the concept of a “crescent moon” and a “full moon,” and used our cookies to do this. Space can be so yummy!

We also talked a small bit about the different planets out in space. We learned that we are one of eight planets. We celebrated our planet, Earth, by creating a special one that contains our very own two hands!

Here is the first step, where we are painting it:

To help develop our fine motor skills, during table activity time my munchkins really enjoyed working with tweezers! I had them move all of their pompoms from its holder on to either a crescent moon or a star. Afterwards, they used their mathematical brains to place each pompom back in it’s place, two poms in each slot.

We’ve been also working on our rote counting! Here, one of my munchkin’s counted the stars he had placed on the felt board he was working with!

In the afternoon, drawing lines connecting stars and crescent moons together on our big white board challenged our fine motor skills!

To complete our day, we read the story, “The Way Back Home,” by Oliver Jeffers. This is an adorable book about a boy who “got stuck” on the moon. I asked my munchkins what they would do if they got stuck on the moon too. Check out their answers:

On Wednesday we focused on the idea of other planets in outer space. We decided to create our own planets for art. We honed in on our creativity and each of my munchkins designed different planets that were their very own!

We talked more about how the sun is a star and talked about how hot it is. We sure are lucky we are the third planet from the sun. Any closer and we would be way too toasty!

We created a sun with our very own hands!!

We love to count down and blast off!! We have been working on counting down from 10, 9, 8… 3, 2, 1 Blast off!!! We talked about the idea of being in a space ship and wondered what we would see out in space if we looked out a window. Check out what my munchkin’s said: 

Here they are using a turkey baster to squirt stars on to their paper.

We have been talking about the different planets throughout the week and on Friday we talked about the planet Jupiter. Although Uranus and Neptune also have been found to have faint rings, Jupiter is better known to have very visible rings. We learned all about Jupiter and decided to create it with glitter for art. Glitter is the best!!!!

Check out a sample of what we worked on all week long!! Our little piece of the universe J