Space activities

Here's a view of our shelving unit we use to display the books/projects that have to do with the topic we are studying. I liked the shelves in the case, which is why I got it because they are slanted, and easy to display the books.



On the top shelf we have two space puzzles, a game, Sputnik (I found this about four years ago at a toy store going out of business and the kids LOVE it!), a folder of real life photos of the moon (all taken by my dad-see here for his actual site of astropictures), a folder of work Nathaniel has completed about space, and there was a space shuttle casting kit, but he decided to make it Saturday- photos of that will show up this week when the paint dries.

Here is a game I found online at Itty Bitty Love, it really is a great idea- you take a calendar, put the big pictures up from each month, cut out and laminate the thumbnail sized ones from the back, and then have the kids match them. I numbered the big pictures and hung them up all over our downstairs at night while the kids were in bed. The laminated cards were placed in a basket and put in our shelf in the "classroom". I numbered the pictures so they have some type of order to follow to find them, and so that Nathaniel can find them and write their names down for me to check. The goal is that he does this many times enough that he remembers the names of the stars and galaxies. The kids had the basket out and were hunting around for the pictures before breakfast was even on the table, it's great for all ages. This is also a great activity because you can reuse old calendars or get them really cheap onsale after Christmas.

Here are the cards and pencil in the basket, and you can see the paper under his arm with his list of names- he fills them in as he goes along:



And a match:



Another thing we've been doing is working on a guided reading project that goes along with If You Decide To Go To The Moon (If you go to the site, you click on enrichment units, and then scroll down until you get to Enrichment Units and you will see the pages to print for Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs, this book, and Chicken Sunday. I found this website while searching for first grade curriculum information. We completed the Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs one, and I thought it was quite helpful for comprehension and thinking skills, so we did this one too. I printed out all the pages and stapled them together. First, we read the book, then each day, we did one page, it really helped my son analyze the books and think about things more deeply. I am going to use this type of model for one story for each unit that we study next year.

We have also been going to NASA's website to play online space games. We have printed a black hole game, I will post pics in our next space acitivities post later this week.