We are having so much fun with our Solar System unit!
To start off the week, we did some review of all of the planets with this file folder game that I made last year.
They simply put the planets in numerical order.
We did the Out-Of-This-World Syllable Practice Book. This was a fun way to get in a little bit of L.A. into our unit. They just placed the correct amount of rockets for how many syllables the word had.
They also lined up the planets with our planets tube.
After learning a few basics about Earth, we made Play-doh Earths, to show the different layers: the Core, the Mantle, and the Crust. We basically rolled a red ball, then flattened a piece of tan to wrap around it and rolled it into a ball. Then did the same with the blue layer, and added small pieces of green to represent land. Then we carefully cut one of the planets in half so we could see the layers. Pretty neat!
They both checked out the globe and we played, “Can you find?”, while they looked for the 7 continents, the 5 major oceans, the equator, both the north and south poles, and Colorado!
To finish off our Earth study, the boys did some Earth vocabulary spelling. They both did great!
We dove right into our Moon study next.
After we read our moon books, we did a fun experiment to see how moon craters are made. We used our cloud dough, (you could also use moon sand), and different sized objects to drop into the sand.
The yellow painted rock was my grandads…He would have loved to be part of our Solar System study!
The boys made these paper plate moon clocks, to reinforce what they had learned about the moon phases.
Here are the books we used: The Moon Book, The Moon Seems to Change, and Moon: Jump Into Science.
I also had made these moon phase cards for them to put into order.
These large moon phase cut-outs I bought from a retiring teacher. Isaac loved playing with these and wanted to make a video to show you all the phases of the moon.
(If you are seeing this blog in an email, click here to see the video, or go to the blog.)
Up next: Mars & Jupiter
To see what we've done already, check out these other posts: Solar System (Overview) & The Sun, Mercury and Venus, New Planet Discovery, Aliens, Astronauts (Preschool), Outer Space Tot School, Moon Sensory Bin.
2 comments:
Wow! Very cool unit! I like how you illustrated the layers of the Earth with playdoh, the cloud dough experiment, tied their vocabulary into what they were learning.
I actually just thought it was all great, and a lot more hands on than they would get to be in a classroom!
Thank you Ms. Jenny! I did have some book work for them, but since we all have "summer fever" I haven't been making them do it all!
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