Dramatic Play:
I built a rocket ship out of cardboard boxes and it was a huge hit! I also made a few jet packs out of 2-liter bottles. These items were all constantly in use by someone all 4 days. They loved them.
There were also space books and magnet building toys (just because they looked space-ish to me), plus stars and planets hanging from the ceiling and a moon that lit up. They were very creative in their play (which is the reason for dramatic play) and it was fun to watch. The magnet toys were usually either to pump more gas into the rocket, or food in the rocket. They were great at using all the space vocabulary we were learning each day! Once their telescopes were painted and dried, they played with them a lot too.
Art:
We made night skies with glue and glitter
Painted telescopes (which they used in dramatic play and outside)
Made suns by squishing yellow, orange, and red paint under saran wrap
Played with galaxy play dough. It was full of glitter and confetti stars, and they all sat and picked out the stars! They played with star cookie cutters and some of the stars and planets off our ceiling.
p.s. black food coloring makes green playdough and purple fingers...just fyi...but somehow the next morning it looked darker (looks black in pictures) but my fingers were still purple for a week
Math:
I have a book about shapes that's all about shapes in space, so I went with the shapes theme and we did a lot of reviewing of our shapes. We did some review in large group, and also had some shape activities in the small manipulatives center both weeks:
We made pictures with pattern blocks
Played with shape magnets on trays
Played shape dominoes
Did lots of different shape puzzles
We made our name/shape rockets too, to review the letters in our names and the shapes. I was SO impressed with how well they did these, with VERY minimal help!
We also reviewed numbers with a space math puzzle and our song, 5 Little Astronauts (one of few songs we've done so far that they actually memorized quickly and sang right along!)
Literacy:
We did lots of reading! We always have a book at large group, but I also pulled some out during snack too. They asked to read lots of the books this week because they were so interested in this topic, and as often happens, I start reading to 1 kid, and I soon have a whole gathering around me listening.
Made name rockets to review letters in our names
Reviewed these letters with a small manipulative activity with flat marbles. Good with circle magnets too. I found this site with tons of these printable pages!
We also had fun rocket papers at the writing table and that attracted more than just the usual kids who go there each day, to go and write, cut, glue and make pictures.
Large Group
We spent day 1 reviewing shapes and making our name rockets.
Day 2 we learned about the moon. We started out at snack with a book and learning that the moon has different phases. We even could watch those phases on the moon in our dramatic play! I had found this cool idea online, but didn't want to carve phases of the moon out of Oreos for everyone, so instead, I just handed out the cookies and we opened them to see what we got! Some kids got full moons, other crescents, and lots of half moons. They were so excited to open each cookie and see what they got, and yell it out. I was pleasantly surprised at all they learned.
We continued learning about the moon in large group by watching the moon landing and painting our bumpy moons with white paint mixed with flour. We added stars on day 3 and took them home.
Day 3 we focused on stars and the sun and learned that the sun is a star! We read about constellations and then did a star activity. We made a pin prick picture, which is a great small motor activity. I would only do this as a whole group, as I don't trust them with pins on their own! They each got a black piece of cardstock with a star outlined on it. I showed them with mine how to poke holes along the lines, then we held it up to the window and could see the star. We placed our papers on top of an upside down styrofoam bowl to do our poking. We talked A LOT about only poking through the paper and not poking ourselves or neighbors. We almost made it injury free, but 1 girl did get a small poke as we were cleaning up when she poked through her paper with her finger behind it, instead of the bowl. This was such a great activity for focus, concentration, and like I said before, small motor skills. It was difficult enough that they were so quiet and working hard, but not too hard that they couldn't do it. They didn't all have the patience to finish their whole stars, but I'm so impressed with how much they all worked and concentrated on it.
Day 4 seemed to be the favorite. After our story, we made our balloon rockets and each got 2 turns. They had so much fun and it was great to be in the room with cheering and screaming kids, and lots of countdowns to blast off! Instructions are here.
Space was so much fun and the kids had SO many questions about everything we learned about. I love having this much fun, learning with the kids and getting them excited about learning new things.
Another un-related highlight was knocking down our igloo! I got much of it down Saturday and packed into my recycle bin for pick-up Monday. They usually come while we're in school, so I left the rest up for the kids to knock down. They went crazy! Who knew milk jugs could be so loud?! They had them all knocked down and smashed and were hiding in them, piling them on each other, kicking them, and smashing them for a good 20 minutes until I was done with the noise. They loved it, and I loved piling them into the recycle bin after class! Welcome Spring!!!
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