Solar System Unit

There was a lot of material to cover for this unit - astronaut spacesuits, space shuttles, sun, moon, planets, layers of the Earth, and the stars. I didn't think we'd have enough time, but the kids were so excited about the content that we got through it all!

Four our solar system studies, the kids learned unique facts about each planet. For example, Mercury has many craters like the moon. Mars is the known as the Red Planet while Earth is known as the Blue planet. Saturn has nine distinctive rings. Uranus spins on its side.  In addition, we learned how each of the planets spin as well as orbits around the sun. To demonstrate this lesson eight children were assigned a planet, one was chose to be the sun, one the moon, and the rest asteroids. Here is a video of that lesson:



We took a closer look at the Earth in this unit, and studied the layers of the Earth. The best visual aid to help the kids learn the layers is THIS LESSON using Play-doh that I found on Pinterest awhile back and demonstrated to my students last year. This year's class loved it just as much!

 

Another popular activity involved Oreos to help the kids learn the phases of the Earth's moon. I mean, what's not to love about a lesson where you get to eat Oreos when it's all said and done!

In our last lesson we learned about stars. Most of our study centered on constellations. We took a look at some of the more well-known constellations. To end of lesson, the kids were given black construction paper and star stickers and were asked to create their own constellations. Idea from this lesson came from Pinterest. For a direct link to the lesson CLICK HERE.

Resources for the lesson I taught in our outer space unit include the following:

 "Adventures in Space" by out-of-this-world teacher/blogger Sarah Cooley. To purchase this her unit CLICK HERE.

 "Oreo Moon Madness" by Hilary Lewis - for this free lesson CLICK HERE.