KJ's Ladies: To the Moon

Today was a theme on "space," which is a hard concept for preschoolers to grasp but we attempted to anyway. I really wanted to do this lesson because the summer sky is so perfect for warm night star gazing. Plus we have a trip planned for the Children's Museum and Planetarium this weekend, which has a preschooler's astronomy show. I searched through a lot of books and websites for this lesson because most were geared to higher levels of learning. I did find some books in the library that when I read them I just summarized a page. I also printed out solar system maps for each of the girls. We started the day with me explaining that we live on earth and there were other planets, I named all of them and explained in minor detail what each was like. We talked about the sun being the center of our solar system and how the moon orbits the earth. Princess #1 understood that there were 9 planets (yes, I know that pluto is no longer considered a "planet" but the book I used was older so for our lesson it was a planet) and that they all orbited (or made circles) around the sun. Princess #2 just was able to name "Earth", "Moon" and "Sun". We then did a "Moon Walk Misson." I got my husband's motorcycle helmets and our computer joystick and set them up on the coffee table. The girls wore their mud boots and I stood on the other side of the room with a walkie talkie to be "mission control". I gave them instructions on how to fly the space shuttle and land on the moon and they were able to drive with the joystick. We also planted a flag on the moon, just like the astronauts did. Then we collected a bag of moon rocks to bring back to school for observation and painting. (We also shot a few aliens while we were up there)It was really cute, because Princess #2 kept calling me "Roger" the rest of the time because I would say "Roger, over and out!" We also made star scopes, which is a toliet paper tubes with black construction paper over one end and then I took a pin to poke holes in the construction paper so that when the girls pointed it at a light they could see stars. We built rocket ships with our legos and finally we made a sun from a template I found at First School. For individual activities Princess #1 worked on the short vowel sound "a" as in astronaut. And Princess #2 worked on recogition of the letter "a", star shape recognition and her cutting abilities, which are coming along nicely. All in all I think they had a really good time, the favorite was our moon walk mission, which of course we had to do again and again.

Princess #2 working on her "a" worksheet