The Solar System {Mars & Jupiter}

 

So we’ve reached the halfway point with our Solar System unit! 

This week we’ve focused on Mars and Jupiter.

We started off with our lesson on Mars, reading the article and answering the questions in the workbook.  The boys were assigned to look through the books for an interesting fact to share with the group.  They are loving this part to each lesson, and are starting to consider themselves “reporters” now!

Since Mars is well known for all of the Rovers that have been sent there, we decided to build our own Mars Rovers!  We used a combination of Trios and Magnetics to build them.  This was an open-ended project that the kids were free to design however they wanted.  So much fun!
















We played this game Destination Mars by The Discovery Chanel.


Next we were on to Jupiter!



We followed our routine with our workbook, and investigational reading. 



The boys did a little bit of Outer-Space math:  Grouping stars into tens and ones, and some alien story problems.





They also built some more sentences with these Space Vocabulary Cards.



We’ve been working through this fun game Planet Quest.  It is a great tool for review and also lots of fun.  Each astronaut visits each planet and answers a question about that planet. 



I’d planned a craft for this week: Paper Mache Planets, but we just ran out of time!  I guess I will try to squeeze it in next week…

Next:  Saturn and Uranus

Have you missed any of the other Solar System posts?  Click here to see the blogroll of all of them!