Space!

We have been using many hands on activities to learn about space and the planets these past few weeks. Aside from reading many stories about space including "A Trip to the Moon," and "The Berenstein Bears go to the Moon," we have been learning space vocabulary and exploring non-fiction books about the moon, sun, stars, earth and planets as well. Learning about astronauts really interested the class so we decided to have a rocket ship dramatic play. We also really enjoyed looking at the famous photographs of the first astronaut walking on the moon and the earth rise from the moon.

 

Here are Miguel and Sisa counting down and manning the ship.

 

 

We learned that you have to have special foods and packaging in space because everything floats around- including people!

 

Here we are working on space vocabulary using our beautiful space puzzle.

 

All of our learning culminated in the planet project. We worked hard learning the names of each planet and how they look. We then selected balloon colors and blew them up to the sizes we thought they should be for each planet. After we had them in order we mixed up a batch of paper mache and spent a lot of time covering each balloon carefully.

 

 

After the planets dried out over the weekend we painted them. The Kindergarteners were so enthusiastic that even after the first layer of paint dried they added details with our special acrylic paints.

 

 

Esther working on Jupiter.

 

Miguel and Dileni painting Neptune and Mars.

 

We used our space book as a guide to hang the planets in the correct order.

 

Then each student chose to write the name of one or two planets and we added them.

 

 

It is so great to have the solar system in our room and the best part is that the Kindergarteners were able to complete all of the steps of the project on their own! It really gives us an idea about our solar system and is a concrete way for us to learn about the planets. We have had so much fun learning about space.