We have spent the past two weeks traveling the solar system and learning about the stars, moon, sun, and planets. The kids really enjoyed this unit! Our centers went a long with this unit and here are some of the things we did:
This was called Meteor Math Wizard. They rolled two dice and a + and – die and generated math sentences to go with the way the dice rolled out. They recorded their work and covered the answer on their game board.
This was star sentence scramble. They had to unscramble words to make a complete sentence and space fact. They also had to include capital letters and punctuation marks.
This center was a favorite! The kids played Race to the Moon and Race Back to Earth using a number line. They rolled a die and moved that many spaces forward on the number line until they reached the moon. They recorded addition math facts as they moved forward to the moon. After they reached the moon they raced back to Earth by subtracting.
This was Star Math Problems. They had to sort the stars with math problems on them into the correct answer and record their problems on a record sheet.
On a Money Mission! They had to count the coins on the cards and match the amounts up with the correct star card.
These are the space books that we made to go along with our unit. We learned about each planet in our books. They did a great job on learning facts about each of the planets.
After learning about each of the planets and how they orbit the sun we made a space picture with the order of the planets from the sun. They also got to add “glitter” stars which made this project extra fun!
The moon was neat to learn about. We made a Phases of the Moon Project to see how the moon changes. They loved the book by Eric Carle, Papa Please Get the Moon for Me.
The sun is a very special star that we can see all the time…even though it is 93 million miles from our planet Earth! We learned that it is not the hottest star but not the coolest star either. They liked learning about constellations also.
One of our favorite projects was done after reading the book Space Case by Edward Marshall. This story is about a space “thing” that comes down to Earth and gets to go trick or treating and go to school. I had the students write about what it would be like to have a “space thing” visit them here on Earth. In their stories they had to name their Space friend, tell where it came from, why did it come down to Earth, what would it do on Earth, and tell if their space friend would stay on Earth or would it leave and why. They were very creative! These are our “Space Friends”!
