Moon and Stars

I am up to my eyeballs in space stuff. I teach the first and second graders the next two Tuesdays at our co-op, and the general topic for our unit is space. I'm covering the stars and constellations next Tuesday and the moon and our space program to the moon the Tuesday after that. The mom who taught the first two weeks already covered the planets in the solar system and the space shuttle. When I was back in Ohio in October, I bought a space unit study guide at the teacher supply store, and it has some good ideas, but not enough. So I have been forced to do a lot of things on my own. I've made connect-the dot constellation pages for Orion and Ursa Major. I've made a coloring page about star temperatures and our spiral galaxy (note: spiral galaxies are very difficult to draw. Do not use mine as a model!). I made a constellation matching page wheere the kids cut out squares that just have the stars on them and glue them under the squares that have the stars with the lines all connected. I still have a few more things to draw. It's an hour and a half of teaching for each grade, and first and second grade kids are pretty active, so you have to have a lot of stuff to keep them occupied!

For the moon week, I didn't have to do as much drawing. We're going to be learning about the phases of the moon, so I need to make a model moon to use with my globe and a light. That will also demonstrate eclipses. There is already a moon phases activity in the activity guide I bought, so I just have to make copies of that. I do need to make a big poster of the moon phases for everyone to look at though. I did make a timeline worksheet that involved quite a bit of drawing. I'm going to glue a line with dates on it onto black construction paper for all the kids. I drew pictures to correspond with Sputnik, Yuri Gargarin's first space flight, the Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo programs, the launch of Apollo 11, and the moon landing. The kids will cut out the pictures and glue them under the approriate dates. You can imagine that took me forever, since I am not an "artiste"! Ahh well, I poked around on the internet, but I couldn't really find little drawings like I wanted. I am trying to get over to Office Depot tomorrow afternoon to make all the copies I need, so that's why the big push tonight to finish it all. Whew!

For our "fifth week activity" (where all the grades do something special together), we are going to the Udvar-Hazy Museum , which is the annex to the National Air and Space Museum that is by the Dulles Airport. There are lots of space things exhibited there, and a lot from the early years of the space program, so I wanted the kids to be somewhat familiar with the terms. We will all see an IMAX movie, and my grades will have a little demo time where they can touch some parts of a space suit, etc. We need to come up with a scavenger hunt-type activity for them because they don't get a guided tour--only older kids. So I guess I'll be a tour guide as well!

Now, on to the making of a Latin review worksheet. I've been making one up every Friday, and the boys have enjoyed doing them. Well, maybe "enjoy" is too strong of a term! But since we're doing it all orally during the week, I figured they need some written reinforcement each week. Goodnight!