December - All about Outer Space

This month is going to be a short month because we will have a two week Christmas break.

December 3 - Sun, Earth, and the Moon

Our room overflowed with  excitement as the students waited to share their Family Turkey. They had been working on this project for almost 2 weeks, and to a 4 year old that is a very long time.

One student had left their turkey pattern at home when their family went to grandma's for Thanksgiving, but that did not deter them at all. They used a paper plate and created their own turkey. Sharing the thoughts behind their design for disguising their turkey was very entertaining and I think that I managed to keep a fairly straight face, because they were serious, just cute!

To introduce the monthly theme I demonstrated how the earth orbits around the sun and the moon orbits around the earth using this craft. The pattern is from http://easypreschoolcraft.blogspot.com/2011/11/sun-earth-moon-model-craft.html?m=1.We enjoyed playing with our sun, earth, and moon. The hardest part was figuring out how to hold the moon and the sun and have a fluid orbit without getting our arms and hands all tangled up.

To help them understand how the earth rotates as it orbits the sun, we took one of our balls to represent the sun and laid out a stretchy band in an oval orbital pattern around the sun. We took turns rotating on our axis (spinning slowly) as we revolved around the sun. A couple of orbits around the sun and we were all feeling the effects of rotating. We used a lot of our Math time orbiting the sun, so we each chose a shape to make with the stretchy and everyone demonstrated that they could make the same shape.

Star gazing was the student's choice for our group activity. My students love to use flashlights!! We played a few of rounds of "I spy with my little eye   (chose a lower case letter) ."

Snack was very interesting! Our sun was a Ritz cracker with cheese circle to go on top (this student decided to make a face on their sun with the cheese) and triangular orange pepper sun bursts. Our earth was a glass of blue Koolaid. Our moons were made of Nutella play dough (a variation of Peanut butter play dough found at http://allrecipes.com/recipe/peanut-butter-playdough/). I used Nutella in place of half of the peanut butter and replaced 1 C. of graham crackers for 1 C. of the powdered milk. I wanted the moon to have more texture than regular play dough.

Outdoor play was not an option with the temperature at 0 degrees and even colder with the wind chill factor. We used our small parachute to learn how to lower and lift the parachute to get the beach ball to roll to different people.

For language arts we started the first big book we will author, a whopping big 10 pages. We made a "Space Book" to record all the different things in space as we learned about them. The pattern/idea came from http://www.littlefamilyfun.com/2012/09/space-theme-preschool-activities.html. Today we did the sun, moon, and earth pages.

Homework was to make their own Sun, Earth, and moon rotation craft.

December 5 - Space Travel

To get the morning off and running we went on a space trip (variation of Going on a Bear Hunt) to introduced space vocabulary. As we traveled around the room looking at pictures of our space vocabulary we made story bracelets. The idea came from  http://drjeanandfriends.blogspot.com/2012/11/story-bracelets.html. We started from earth with a blue bead, rocketed to the sun where we added a large yellow bead. From there we jumped back in to our space ship so we could travel to other planets. Along the way we encountered a shooting star, adding a star bead; a meteor, adding a red bead; and the asteroid belt, adding a brown bead. After the asteroid belt we encountered a space alien (large purple bead). We got scared and wanted to go back home. We used our story bracelet beads to help us quickly fly back past all of our vocabulary word pictures and we arrived home safely!

After all the outer space excitement we did a little down to earth tree observation. Our deciduous tree has lost all of its leaves and our evergreen is still green, well mostly green we couldn't see all of the pine needles because they were covered with snow. On of the students hypothesized that the snow may be causing some of the pine needles to change color just like the leaves did. We'll will have to wait for the snow to melt to see if her hypothesis is correct.

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·         Having time to calm down from the space alien scare, we tried our hand at rocket launching, if you look closely you will see a straw and rocket being shot straight up in the air. This idea came from http://curiouskangaroos.blogspot.com/2011/07/paper-rocket.html. Our paper rockets fit a little too snugly and sometimes they were hard to blow off. We also discovered that if you have your finger on the rocket, no matter how hard you blow it does not come off. We tried different trajectories with the straw to see how high or how far we could launch our rockets. 

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·        For snack we made Rocket cookies (graham cracker rocket, slathered with Nutella) with carrot strips for flames. Our rockets even encountered a meteor shower (sprinkles on body of rocket). We even discovered a star in the planet we visited (apple slice). To round out our snack we had a cheese stick and milk.

·         While outdoor we played "Spin Cycle" (one of the students idea because she couldn't remember earth rotation) with ribbons on rings. We twirled and watched the ribbons as we rotated around the sun (a tree). The rest of the morning was spent adding the rocket and astronaut pages in our Space book.

 Homework was just two simple crafts a Hippo hand puppet, from www.dltk-kids.com/animals/mbaghippo.html and letter C craft from my files.

December 10, 2013 - Planets

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This morning we started off exploring a big book, "A Book About Planets and Stars" by Betty Polisar Reigot. I found a really cute video with a catchy song that teaches about some of the unique characteristics of each planet in the Solar System. It is "The Solar System Song" video by KIDSTV123 at http://www.youtube.com. (Sorry you will have to search for the video because I couldn't get a direct link to the video.). 

·         After watching the video, we watched it again and made a "Solar System bracelet" stopping after each planet and adding a bead. I used a large orange star bead for the sun. Mercury was a green bead because it was where we started the planets. Venus was a tall thin flower bead, the petals made a "V" shape to help us remember Venus. Earth was a blue heart bead. Mars was a red pony bead. Jupiter, because it is the largest we used a long orange bead. Saturn was a Tri-bead student's choice of color. Uranus was a icy blue pony bead. Lastly Neptune was a star bead because it is way out there among the stars.

      For math we practiced ordinal numbers as we placed all the planets in order starting from the sun.

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·         Snack time provided us a creative outlet, we made Planet kabobs (a variation of idea found on http://www.momontimeout.com/2013/04/fruit-n-waffle-kabobs-with-maple-cinnamon-yogurt-dip/ We used a straw for the kabob and added mini Eggo waffles, banana slices,  and grapes for our planets. To make the snack even tastier we ate it with Milky Way (yogurt) dip and had juice to wash down our planets.

·        After all the sitting around and the many fine motor skills we needed to add some gross motor activity outside. We did some planet hopping, very strategically we placed hula hoops on the grass and hopped, jumped, skipped, rolled, and flew from one planet to another just like an astronaut. 

·         Tired from all of our space traveling adventures out side, we came back in to work with play dough. We made planet balls to place on our counting sheets. (This is an old picture using pom-poms.)

·         In place of story time the students wanted to watched the Solar system song video again. We used the time wisely by pausing the video as soon as the planet's name was sung and we tried to remember one of the unique individual characteristics for each planet. I was surprised at the details they remembered. Before showing the video, I had watched it several times and could not recall a small portion of the details that they recalled after watching it only a couple of times. 

 Homework was a simple worksheet "Planets/Not Planets" found at  http://www.1plus1plus1equals1.com/PreschoolPacksSolarSystem.html and some space color by number pictures from my files.

December 12 - Stars & Constellations

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      To spark interest in today's theme we learned "Star Light, Star Bright" song. (The song sheet I got from http://www.prekinders.com/nursery-rhymes/) We added actions to help remember the words. We held our hands up and made our fingers wiggle like little stars for the first line, we made binoculars with our hands and put them to our eyes for the second line, we made praying hands for the third line, and for the fourth line we moved our praying hands to the side of our head like a pillow.

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      This picture and instructions for making constellation tubes are found at http://mommaowlslab.blogspot.com/2013/09/diy-constellation-tubes.html. For science we used our flashlights to shine into the toilet paper roll constellations and shine our constellation onto the wall. It took several tries and adjustments to the beam of our flashlights to get a clear picture of the constellations. While the constellation was on the wall we used our fingers to connect the dots and get a better feel for how constellations made.

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·         Snack consisted of peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, that we cut into star shape; sliced carrot coins, that we used small cutter to cut out stars shapes; apple juice; and yogurt.

·         Outdoor play consisted of playing musical planets which was a variation of Tuesday's games. We followed the rules for Musical Chairs just they traveled from planet to planet, trying to arrive before the music stopped.

·        To end off the day we made two pages of constellations in our space books. Each student was given a small sheet of gold stars that they placed thoughtfully on their page. Once the stars were down, we connected the stars to uncover each secret constellation.  We then took time to do more star gazing (which really means identifying lower case letters). 

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·         Homework was a couple more space color by number pages and they were to made star creature (big star body, smaller star head, 6 different eyes to choose from). Above is one example. I can not find the source for this craft. If any one knows please let me know and I will give the creator credit.

December 17 - Gingerbread

I know, gingerbread has nothing to do with space, but it is the week before Christmas and I decided that we needed to include some fun traditions.

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     To start the morning we read "The Gingerbread Boy" by Paul Galdone. The students were really excited because they thought they knew this story, boy were they surprised when it wasn't exactly like the one they had heard before. So we took some time to talk about the differences between this book and the Gingerbread stories they had heard before. We made a simple Venn diagram just as an off the cuff activity. 

·         Then things got really exciting, we did a new math activity. We got to use bingo markers for the very first time. OH JOY!!! We learned 1) if you hit the marker on the paper really hard the ink splatters every where (see by number two); 2) if you leave the marker on the number for a long time, it bleeds through the paper and onto the table; and 3) it takes a few minutes for the ink to dry, touching it right away you make a mess on your fingers. We used dice to determine which number was to be blotted out.

·         Once we cleaned up our work area and our hands, we donned our aprons and headed to the kitchen to make some wonderful smelling cinnamon ornaments as a gift for our families. This recipe is very similar to my recipe that I have had since forever. It was just easier to copy and paste than to type in mine.
     

SCENTED CINNAMON ORNAMENTS

DO NOT EAT! 4 oz. ground cinnamon 1 tbsp. ground cloves 1 tbsp. nutmeg 3/4 c. applesauce 2 tbsp. white glue In medium bowl combine cinnamon, cloves and nutmeg. Add applesauce and glue. Stir to combine. Work mixture with hands 2 to 3 minutes or until dough is smooth and ingredients are thoroughly mixed. Divide into 4 portions. Roll out each portion to 1/4 inch thickness. Cut dough with cookie cutters of desired shapes. Using a straw or toothpick, make a small hole in the top of ornament. Place ornaments on wire racks and allow to dry at room temperature for several days. Thread ribbon through hole. Makes 32 (2 inch) ornaments. http://www.cooks.com/recipe/yq6h63hy/scented-cinnamon-ornaments.html

      After many sighs of frustration and silly giggles we successfully finished the ornaments and prepared to have snack. Snack was not the highlight of the day, we just had cheese & crackers, with yogurt and apple juice. So we turned it into a tea party and we got to eat our snack on some left over baby shower plates.
     
     Out side we practiced our jump rope skills with the Hula hoops.
     
     Coming back in we moved onto a math activity. Because it involved something that they could eat they were eager to learn something new. Using an off-brand of Lucky Charms cereal we sorted the cereal from the marshmallows. With the boring cereal to eat we sorted and graphed the different marshmallow shapes. The very best part of the activity was when the students got to eat the marshmallow pieces.

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·         Before the moms started arriving we had to check to see if our ornaments were dry and ready. Much to their surprise, the teacher was right and they were not dry after just an hour of drying. 

·         To redirect their attention, I explained what their homework would be and how important it was to keep it a secret. They were to go on a scavenger hunt and fill a special white lunch bag with things that represent Christmas to them.They could only bring things that mom/dad approved to go into the bag. To fill the time we pulled out the bean bag chairs, got snugly cozy, and read books.

December 19 - Christmas

·         Bringing something to share fills the room with excitement, secrecy, and giddiness.

     This student got a real surprise when she opened her bag and found that their Elf on the shelf was hiding in her bag. We almost came to tears because she knew that she was not to touch their elf and she couldn't think of a way to show her other things without touching him. When she explained that only an adult could touch the elf, I suggested that maybe I could take him out and she could just talk about him. Quick thinking saved us from a melt down. The things that get her excited about Christmas are: snow, holiday socks, elf on the shelf, and of course baby Jesus. 

      This student also loves snow, making ornaments, the Christmas tree, and baby Jesus. She was so very proud that her snowflake had been made out of a paper that she colored special just for the snowflake.

  

·         I tried something new and it was not a success at all, my students even said that they were bored. I tried to teach them how to finger knit. I remember how my boys loved to make chains for holiday decorating, but my students wanted nothing to do with it. Timing may have played a big part in their interest. The last day of school before a holiday NEEDS to be filled with exciting things and lots of movement. So hopefully it was just bad timing, we will try it again.

      To get some movement into the schedule we played a game of Roll a Santa, found here: http://www.teacherspayteachers.com/Product/Roll-a-Santa-Freebie-427924. This provided some excitement and focus for their abundant energy.

·         Snack time was a lot more interesting for the students. We made the 3 kings/wise men who visited baby Jesus, found at http://www.creativekidsnacks.com/. We found camel animal crackers, added sliced ham for the bodies, a carrot coin for the head, a star in the heaven, and most difficult of all were the little crowns of cheese. From the scraps of cheese slices we cut small gifts for the kings to bring to Jesus. The students even told the story of the wise men's visit to the baby as they ate the different bits.
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·         The last item of business before the Christmas break was to finish our gift to our families. With great care, we threaded ribbon through the cinnamon ornaments and tried to tie knots in the ribbon. The knot tying was a bit over whelming for the students, so I just tied the knots for them. We did have a couple of dropped ornaments that broke, but everyone shared so that every family would have the same number of ornaments. 

     With the ornaments all wrapped and ready to take home, we chose to sing and dance to Christmas songs. When the moms arrived to get their children they found us singing, at the top of our lungs, and dancing to "Frosty the Snowman". We were having so much fun that we hadn't noticed that moms were arriving. 

·         The students were given a fair amount of homework to do over the break. They were given a Nativity craft to do that required 13 toilet paper rolls (we had all been saving them in preparation for this activity). The craft can be found here:  http://catholicicing.com/diy-printable-nativity-for-kids/ (search for nativity craft). They were given the instructions to finish the last couple of pages in their solar system book. Also instructions on how to finger knit, maybe they will want to give it a try with their older siblings.