The Solar System {Saturn & Uranus}

 

The kids have been really excited to start learning about Saturn.

I agree that it is the most intriguing and beautiful planet (besides Earth!)
.


Before we even started our lesson this week, we did our craft. We made our own Ringed Planets by painting Styrofoam balls (cut in half) and gluing a CD in-between the layers.



We used tempera paints, a multi-pack of Styrofoam balls, and blank CD’s.  I think it would be fine to color the balls with markers too.









Each of the kids painted their planet however they chose.  Once they were dry, I laced a string through one half so that we could hang the planets up in our school room.  Then I glued the two halves together with the disc in-between, using a hot glue gun.







We made a KWL chart for Saturn before starting our lesson.  What we Know, what we Want to know, and what we Learned.



This had become a really powerful tool for our homeschool, and we plan to continue using this technique to teach other subjects as well.



We did a very similar lesson plan with Uranus, using a KWL chart, our homemade workbook, and investigative reading skills to discover more about the planet Uranus.  One interesting fact that Isaac discovered was that it would take 50 Earths to fill the planet Uranus.  So we did a little experiment to see how that would look…



Isaac counted out 50 marbles to represent the 50 Earths…



Then he used a pipe cleaner to create Uranus just the size to fit all of the marbles into it.



We finished off with some review of the Planet Song, our File Folder Game, and played Planet Quest again!

Next:  Neptune, Pluto, and Constellations!

To see the rest of the Solar System posts, click here!

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!

The Solar System {Earth & Moon}

 

 

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.