The activity set that I will be focusing on going forward will definitely be the Moon. Although we do lots of work on the planets, I find that we don’t spend enough time on the moon. I love the ideas of creating a man on the moon and using lots of different materials. It makes so much sense seeing as it is the first element of space that children are exposed to.
One activity that my class particularly enjoyed to realise the grand scale of space was to get some playdough and divide it into 51 parts. They then, in pairs, put them in two groups, one to represent the moon and the other to represent the earth. It is interesting to see their different understandings on the size difference.
The actual ratio is 50:1
I absolutely love these activity! Particularly the planet game where they run around and land on the hoops when they hear a planet name. I find, especially with the smaller ones, they find it hard to remember the names and as we know, repetition is key! https://esero.ie/wp-content/uploads/2015/01/01_The-planets.pdf