Teaching Two

We started our solar system unit this week by talking about the sun and Earth.  There are so many activities I want to have my girls do that I decided to take 2 weeks on it.   So next week we will finish it up by talking about the planets.  We read a book called Sun by Steve Tomecek which had lots of great facts.  After the book I had the girls recall some facts they learned from the book and I wrote each fact on a sun ray.  It turned out cute.

We talked about the differences between rotating and revolving and had each girl pretend to be the sun while the other was the Earth.  This way they were able to see how the Earth spun while traveling around the sun.

I found a great printable Sun and Earth fill in the blank unit here.  So each day we completed a few pages of it.  I read another great book called Earth and focused on what Earth is made of and the layers.  The girls memorized each layer and learned different characteristics about each layer and then made their own model of Earth using play doh.  We used red for the inner core, orange for the outer core, yellow for the mantle, black for the crust, and then blue and green for the water and land.  I loved their faces once they cut theirs in half and they saw all the layers.

She asked for the globe to make sure her “lands” looked right.

Finally our last day we spent on the moon.  They got to write about what they would do if they could go to the moon.  Then we talked about the different phases of the moon.   We went outside and used their new telescope to look at it.  Then we used Oreo cookies to make each phase of the moon.  They learned (and I relearned) what waxing and waning meant as well as what a gibbous moon looks like.  They had to tell me each phase in order before they were allowed to eat them.

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