Planets - our week 5 inquiry

This week we have been studying about planets.
Monday we started by watching a video about planets after this video we talked about what we know about them. With a buddy students then came up with 2 questions they may like to find out about planets.
Tuesday we started exploring some of the planets. Children were interested to find out how planets were made and I found it hard to describe so I made up a solar system in a container (water and glitter) and explained that the glitter is like dust and dirt and it slowly attaches to each other making a planet.

I then gave students a booklet that has each planet and a sentence about them. We discussed the features and then students coloured them to match. One student was interested in finding out about craters so together we did some research that help him answer his questions.

Thursday we found out about who discovered the planets and who visits them. The boys were pretty excited about astronauts and we watched a short video about astronauts landing on the moon - I decided to venture down the astronaut path for a writing topic.

On Friday we had our planets craft day. Student were then given a cut paste activity where they were required to order the planets.

We also did our Astronaut Application - but haven't finished them (will do this on Monday as part of writing).

I thought this was a cute idea and a good way to incorporate literacy through our inquiry. If you would like this document you can download it from my google docs.

Then for the afternoon we made some planets using shaving foam and dye. They turned out really good. See below for step by step photos:

1. We added shaving foam and dye (before hand we had a discussion about shave foam and what/who uses it).

2. Next we mixed it together with a popsicle stick.

3. We pushed our piece of paper down into the mix and left it to dry.

4. We scraped the excess foam off with a ruler and then cut it out

5. We lined them up in order from the sun and pretended we were astronauts blasting off to space.

A close up of the final product.