One of my friends asked me yesterday if we can learn about fairy tales and princesses.  So, we diverted from our Space theme today!  Of course, we made magic fairy wands that can also be shooting stars! They built their names using shapes to make a castle, traced various fairy tale pictures and used magnets to build castles. For fine motor practice they built shape castles.

What would you bring back from a trip to the moon? Moon rocks!  They were given foil to create moon rocks. 
The moon's surface is rough and mountainous with many craters. They crumpled up a round piece of paper, flattened and glued into their journals to see the craters. They used foil and paint to create a moon.
They were given stars and encouraged to count out 12 and glue in their journals. 

Snake, sock, sun, and star all start with S! This week they used stencils to trace in their journals, traced lines, used stickers, and paint to create Ss.  They colored, cut and glued Ss in their journal and used puzzle pieces to create the letter Ss. 

The sun is a star. All planets rotate around the sun. You shouldn't look at the sun because its light can hurt your eyes. What color is the sun? Did you know the sun is actually white but shows all the colors of the rainbow?  
The sun, made up mostly of hydrogen, is at the center of our universe. It is the brightest object in our sky and provides us with light and heat.  During this Invitation to Create, children used a paper plate and paint to design their own image of the sun, then explored fringe-cutting the edges to create rays. 
They were encouraged to create their own constellation designs. They sorted stars (small, medium and large). They took turns rolling the pocket cube and they identified the size and color of the star. Today was a play dough day, we used space cookie cutters and stars. ​And finally, as a group they all participated in building number rocket ships!

Stars are giant balls of gas. White or blue stars are very hot while orange or red stars are cooler. Stars look like they are twinkling in the sky because of the atmosphere's distortion of our line of light. 
​They each made a star headband using markers and star shapes. They used star counters to create a constellation. 
As a group, we made rocket ships with numbers. They played in the space sensory bin!

​Get ready to take off into space! 5, 4, 3, 2, 1 BLAST OFF! 
​The sun is the largest object in our solar system. Our planet Earth would be frozen without the sun. We need the sun to survive. Children may already have some prior knowledge of familiar objects seen in the sky, and engaging in hands-on activities can help them further understand these complex scientific concepts. Children will learn to think more scientifically about the world.  
I have created a space sensory bin for this unit.  

They each chose two colors, I placed white paper in a plastic jar with bouncy balls.  They shook the jar up down and all around, for the younger children I showed them how to move the jar up and down. This is a great way to introduce the concept of color mixing for the older kiddos. 

Working on letter Qq....sorting, q-tip painting, stickers, color & cut, writing and building letter Qq.  For the children that are learning to cut, while the others are cutting out the pieces for their project, the others are practicing cutting scrap paper.
The butcher paper sorting activity also gets them up and moving!

We worked on letter Kk.  Drawing in journals and using small stickers to form K.