While we were on vacation
a space ship landed
in Kindergarten!
We have been very busy already this week. We are working on redecorating our classroom, since all the ocean projects went home. Today we worked on making kites for the cubby room and decorating black stars for the space ship. There are lots of new things to explore on the Discovery Table, as well as a whole space ship to play in, new computer games, new books and new toys in blocks!
We have started to work on control panels to pilot our space ship on our trip through the solar system.
As we begin each new theme we always ask the children what they already know about the topic. We heard many facts about space, and some that may not be facts, but give us ideas about what we would like to learn more about. This is the list of "What we know about Space". As we have been reading more books about the planets we have already found out that there are really 9 planets, and there is gravity on the planets, just not the same as on Earth.
Planets are rocks
Some planets have gas, except Earth
The sun is the biggest star
There are 10 planets
The moon is not a planet or a star
Around Jupiter, those little colors are storms
Every planet goes around the sun every year
There's no gravity in space
There's lots of colors
Each planet is a different color
Earth is what people live in
We are making everything we need for our trip through the solar system. We now have almost as many control panels as a real space ship. Phones seem to be a popular item for space travel!
Every astronaut needs a space helmet and we have begun to make beautiful helmets from grocery bags, covered with shiny "sticky paper". Our thanks go to Flexcon, a company in Spencer, MA, which donates the ends of rolls of this wonderful contact paper to schools.
As we continue to get ready to blast off we needed to make air tanks to breathe in space.
We have also been making lots of things to hang on our ceiling, including rockets, flying saucers and a whole papier mache solar system.
Some of our other projects have been decorating our doors and working on a paper "space" quilt. We made spring flowers for our double doors and astronauts for our single door. Our space quilt is coming along slowly. Everyone has made a pattern block rocket so far and we will be making our other pieces this week.
A few close-up views..
One of our writing projects has been a take-off from a Magic School Bus book-
"K-Kids...Lost in Space". Here are a few of the pages, but you'll have to stop by to read the whole book.
I am floating to Venus.
Bryce got sucked up by the great red spot on Jupiter.
Jack was stuck on Saturn's iciest rings.
Connell got sucked into a black hole.
Nicholas got lost on Mars.
Natalia was cold on Pluto.
We had a special guest this week! Jack's mom brought us little clay pots to plant and helped us plant grass seed for our own little grass head people!
click on the picture to enlarge
We've been zooming through the solar system! This week we made our own telescopes and Sculpey clay planet necklaces. We also finally (almost) finished our space quilt and it should be hanging up early next week. This was a complicated project, but the kids did a wonderful job. We are also working on a slideshow of the planets. The children are working in groups, drawing a picture of their favorite planet and writing three facts about it. These are about half way done right now. We hope to have the children take pictures of them or scan them if we can get over to the computer lab and then have a short slide show of all their hard work.
Be sure to check the NEXT PAGE
for more
pictures as we get ready to blast off!
