Space

Our last topic for the year is space.

We began this topic with a visit from Grade 3 who had just been studying space. After this we looked at the planets and their features. I then gave children a sheet that had the 8 planets (and Pluto) and they had to colour and glue in the correct order in their book. 

The next lesson I gave students a questionnaire that required them to read through space info cards. The next day I gave students the option to make either a poster or booklet to inform people what they had found out. They used their questionnaires and also a range of texts about space. This was completely independent (I was very impressed with their work). 

For art we made out own planets. This was extreeeemly messy (I had done this lesson with a previous class and I don't remember it being as stressful, maybe because we had done it outside). I gave children a small pile of shaving foam (in itself they loved) they then choose what colours they wanted their planet to be and added several drops of food colour. They then did a little mix - the less it was mixed the better they turned out). They then put the paper on top of the shaving foam - normally I would have used a ruler or the likes to scrap the excess foam off. However by that point the classroom was chaos! 

We then pushed all the desks back and covered the floor in paper to make our sky. We covered a piece of paper in black paint (school has run out of black paper so we had to improvise) and then we sprinkled it with white glitter. Once both had dried we cut out the planets and glued them on. They did turn out looking good.

The next week we began by making rockets. This was simply paper on the end of a straw - what fun! We had competitions to see whose rocket could go the furthest and just in general had fun shooting the rockets.

For art this week we made our own aliens. We began by sticking 8 googly eyes on our paper. I then modeled how to draw an alien using the eyes and let the children draw as they pleased.