Our class’ study of space evolved out of a unit we did around nursery rhymes. The rhyme we used to get us going was Hey Diddle Diddle. This poem was displayed and interacted with, out of the pocket chart for over a week.

The story that we used to go along with it was Over the Moon by Rachel Vail and illustrated by Scott Nash. We were inspired to create our own book of a cow jumping over the moon, beside the moon, under the moon, etc. Our teacher also took us step by step to show us how to draw a cow.

Next we used the story Night and Day written by Nancy Davidson and illustrated by Michael Grejniec (from Ginn First Collections program). We talked about what happened in the beginning, middle and end of the story. We illustrated these parts on a 8 ½”x 14” piece of paper. Then our teacher took us one by one to tell her the story.

In our journals we reflected on what activities we do in the day time and what we do at night. (These activities were used to correspond with our religion program.) Later we created pictures using pastel crayons, construction paper and a wash on watercolor paper to illustrate our daytime and nighttime activities.

While we were talking about the moon we also did the story, Mooncake by Frank Asch. We decided to make Mooncake, it was delicious. It is made with one can of lemonade frozen concentrate and a 2L container of vanilla ice cream.

During this time we started to get into factual information and brainstorming what we already know about space. Sam brought in a picture of Mars that was in the newspaper that he shared with us. We have also been collecting space words on an alphabet chart that we can compile into an alphabet book near the end of our unit.

As we are collecting alphabet pages we are creating a book of facts for each of the planets. Each day we read about a different planet and add to our book. We are also practicing printing of lowercase letters. The book has each planet's name printed in capitals and we are translating it into lower case.

For centers we have a spaceship with controls and spacesuits that we can wear. We can go searching for moon rocks (ping pong balls with the letters of the alphabet on them in the sandbox).

We have a list of words that we can spell using playdoh. We are collecting supplies to create our own spaceships. One of the parents has been spending time taking us onto the computers so we can explore the NASA website and play some space games.

http://kids.msfc.nasa.gov/

Our teacher spent time teaching us how to draw astronauts. We did a small drawing and printed the word astronaut to go with our picture. This drawing will help us when we paint our life size figures of our bodies.

Our reading buddies traced our bodies so we could paint ourselves dressed in spacesuits and then label the parts of the suit and gear astronauts wear.

While we have been doing all of this we are learning our number words through the poem One, Two Astronaut’s Shoe. We are using moon rocks to measure our life size astronaut paintings as nonstandard units of measurement.

We have also read the book Brown Bear, Brown Bear and have patterned our own story with “Teacher, Teacher, Who do you see?” “I see Astronaut Shawn looking at me.”  Astronaut Shawn, Astronaut Shawn, Who do you see? I see Astronaut . . . Looking at me.”

http://www.nasa.gov/externalflash/m2k4/index1.html