Space Week 2: Mostly Planets

We continued our space themed activities this week, and had a good time. I think it’s a very hard concept for little ones to grasp – everything in their lives is so centered on their own little world, but this is all about exposure, awareness, vocabulary, and having some fun time together. Here’s what we got up to:

Planet Patterning

I printed out lots of copies of the solar system three part cards from Imagine Our Life (at two pages per sheet) and cut out just the planet pictures. We used them to make different patterns, based on the sets of planets Munchkin picked out. I let her create the start of the pattern, and then helped her continue it.

Planets Mini Book

I printed out a mini-book from 3dinosaurs.com’s space pack. I printed the version with dotted planet names underneath so that Munchkin could trace the letters if she wished.

Salt Tray

It’s been quite a while since we’ve had our sandpaper letters and salt tray out. Munchkin is writing more and more, and forming more and more letters. Lately she’s been writing her e’s upside down for some reason, so I thought it was time to work on them. We worked on the letters of her name (her choice), and we will keep working on this as she is now starting to tell me there are certain letters she “can’t write.”

Foil Painting

Munchkin had metallic paint to paint with on a piece of foil. Seemed spacey to me…I also provided some foam stars to stick down. Fun stuff.

Planet Puzzle

I printed this puzzle from 3dinosaurs‘ Space Pack. Since I just printed on paper, and since Munchkin has never really been interested in these strip puzzles, I thought providing a glue stick to glue it onto paper might help. Nope. She didn’t even glance at it! Oh well!

Space Papers

I printed out some space themed colouring sheets from a few different places. We didn’t work on these together, but Munchkin did colour a couple of planets independently one day. She even cut Jupiter out, and cut and glued the name on top! Printables we used here and here.

Coffee Filter Planets

I had little pots of liquid watercolours left over from a few weeks ago, and wanted to find some open ended planet art to do. Munchkin has always loved squirting colours onto coffee filters. This time, I pulled planet pictures out as inspiration and asked her to either create blue-green planets, or red-yellow ones. She did one of each, with pictures of planets in front of her. We also pressed the coffee filter to a piece of paper with a damp towel so that the colour would transfer through – this worked great!

Shaving Foam Planets

We used the same liquid water colours here. We squeezed some shaving foam onto a tray, dropped on colours and mixed with a wooden stirrer. Then, we took circles of cardstock, pressed the circle on top of the shaving foam, peeled it off, let it sit a bit, and scraped the extra shaving foam off. We’ve done this before with Dollar Store shaving foam and they’ve come out great! This was a Gillette travel size I found in the cupboard…and it didn’t work very well!

The Solar System

I found some great sized planet images and printed them out. I wasn’t really sure what we were going to do with these…we ended up laying them out on the carpet in order – but not with orbits to scale! They sat of the dining table for a few days, and we ended up having a pretty good discussion one lunch time about the planets spinning, and how Uranus is tipped on it’s side. Both kids thought it was hilarious that I was spinning bits of paper between my fingers, and mimicking Uranus getting smashed by a large object, making it turn sideways.

Here are our art walls for the week. Little Sister got some fingerpainting in, but I didn’t get pictures of her in action (too busy containing mess, and responding to her requests for her fingers to be cleaned off!):