Our Solar System

To the solar system and beyond! We learned about the 8 planets, the sun and other stars, and the moon the week before last (Last week was assessments, thank you all for coming)! So, its obvious that we needed to start the week with a blast by making our baking soda and vinegar rockets! What a great way to practice counting backwards from 10.

We also made these rockets to take home.  Just a straw and a puff of air to get these rockets launched!

We used our 3-D glow in the dark planets, along with our planets poster to help us put the planets in order.  Which planet is your favorite?

This center was definitely our favorite for the week! Unfortunately, I couldn't get a good picture to show the full effect. But, for a writing center, we practiced writing our letters in the dark! I set this up in our toy closet. You can't tell that they are in the dark because of my flash (didn't work without the flash either, that made it too dark), but I painted this piece of canvas with glow-in-the-dark paint and then we used LED light pens to write our letters and they lit up! We also had glow-in-the-dark stars on the walls, and a black light in the room for the full effect.

\For a math center, we made these countdown rockets. We has stamps from 1-10 and the kids were instructed to color their rocket and countdown from 10 to 1 with the stamps.

We also practiced our letter recognition by doing what is called "reading the room". I wrote every letter of the alphabet on a star and placed them around the room. We used flashlights to find the letters and make them 'shine'.

We talked about what life on other planets might like and made our own aliens.

We named some of the constellations and made our own constellations with at our lite brite center.

We played another great strategy game called Day and Night by Smart Games.  The picture shows just a shadow picture of the pieces, and the kids had to try to build that picture by using their colored pieces. By it just showing the shadow, the lines of the pieces are not defined, this makes for a fun challenge.

We read the book Good Night Moon by Margaret Wise Brown and played the board game. 

And, we drew pictures on our Crayola Glow book and watched our stories come to life with the moving 3-D glow effect. So fun!

Books of the week:

Dr. Suess' There's No Place Like Space

and

Good Night Moon by Margaret Wise Brown

Thank you all for your support and help! The assessments went really well last week! You are all great!