Space... The Final Frontier. These are the voyages of the starship Enterprise. It's continuing mission, to explore strange new worlds, to seek out new life and new civilization, to boldly go where no one has gone before! I proudly grew up watching Captain Picard and his crew on board the Enterprise 1701-D. I saw all 3 of the original Star Wars movies around the age of 12. Since then, space has been one of my favorite topics. It's beautiful, and it's interesting.
Our boys (ages 6 and 7) currently love Star Trek and Star Wars, as well. So I knew that an astronomy unit would go over real well with them.
We started with the Sun and went outward to each planet, covering comets, asteroids, and meteoroids, too. For each lesson, we either looked through a homemade PowerPoint or watched a video on YouTube. Then the boys were allowed to color each planet, in any way they wanted. (I figured when they're older, I'll make them put together a more detailed booklet with more realistic colors.)
Most importantly, I had them learn the order of the 8 planets. (While we learned about Pluto, I didn't include Pluto in the following activity.) In order to help my visual, hands-on learners, I made these cute sticks.
What You Need:
-- Popsicle/Craft Sticks
-- A cutout of each planet
-- Glue
-- Permanent Marker
For my cutouts, I simply found pictures of the planets to color, saved them on my computer, and then adapted it to the size I needed using Microsoft Word.
(I have since made my own black-and-white clip art of the 8 planets for this activity, which is available in my TpT Store.)
After coloring the planets (I love coloring), I glued them to the end of a stick. On the other end, I wrote the planet's name in permanent marker. It's really quite simple, cute, and the kids loved this! They've used it constantly to put the planets in order. You can also use these sticks to put the planets in alphabetical order or by size.
Once we covered each of the planets, we did some Cosmic Math. The first worksheet is Moon Math. The boys graphed the number of moons for each planet. Second, they graphed the number of Earth years it takes for each planet to orbit the Sun once. Third, they graphed which planets have rings and which ones do not. It's a fun way to incorporate math and science!
Enjoy!
