Hill/Box Cluster: planets

The third summer school class I taught was called "Soaring Through the Solar System". This class I taught to the 5-7 year old age group in the mornings and then in the afternoons I taught this class to the preschool. These two weeks are pretty much a blur......I taught for 10 hours a day (without a single break)....so I'm pretty proud I survived! I had never taught preschool before and was pretty intimidated about it at first, but it ended up being a lot of fun. Teaching preschool is VERY different from teaching my 5-7 year-olds. Some of my preschool kids were only 2....so even though I was teaching the same subject I still had to pretty much create all new activities.

By this point in the summer my camera was completely dead.....so I don't have any pictures of my kids actually doing the activities.....the pictures that are posted on this blog are ones I found from the different blogs and other websites where I found the ideas to do these crafts. Sorry I don't have any actual photos of my students doing these, but I'll try to do the best with what I have!

For both classes we started the first day by talking about the sun....then days 2-9 we learned about planet a day....and finally on the last day we learned about astronauts and why Pluto is no longer a planet.

Day 1: The Sun
The first day we began by talking about the sun. My goal for both classes was to teach them a few facts about the sun (such as it is a star, all the planets rotate around it.....it is pretty big etc.). For some reason one of my preschool students didn't grasp the concept that the sun isn't a planet....and according to her dad, she is still argues with him when he says the sun isn't a planet!

This is the craft we made when we learned about the sun. I got the idea from a blog you can check out for yourself here.

Days 2-9: The Planets

We started with the planet closest to the sun, Mercury, and then continued until we covered all the planets. To help the kids remember some things about the planets we learned the song "The Family of the Sun". Each day we would add a new verse until we learned the entire song. I changed the song a little bit....the song was written when Pluto was still a planet so I changed that. Here are the lyrics:

Chorus:

The family of the sun,

the family of the sun,

there are eight planets,

in the family of the sun.

Mercury is hot,

and Mercury is small.

Mercury has no air to breathe;

it's just a rocky ball.

Chorus

Venus has thick clouds,

that hide what is below.

The air is foul; the ground is hot.

It rotates very slow.

Chorus

We love the Earth, our home,

its oceans and its trees.

We eat its food, we breathe its air,

so no pollution, please.

Chorus

Mars is very red.

It's also dry and cold.

Some day you might visit Mars,

if you are really bold.

Chorus

Great Jupiter is huge

We've studied it a lot.

We've found that it has lots of moons

and a big red spot.

Chorus

Saturn has great rings.

We wondered what they were.

Now we know their icy rocks.

Which we saw as a blur.

Chorus

Uranus is big.

Its cold and greenish-blue.

We've found it rotates sideways

and has rings around it too.

Chorus

Neptune's far away.

Its cold and green and blue.

The planet has a lot of clouds

and rings around it to.

Chorus

The song is to the tune of the farmer and then dale and the original version of the song can be found here.

The day we learned about the Earth we made this little craft. Our goal for that day was to learn about how the earth travels around the sun and the moon travels around the earth. I think this activity did a great job of showing that. I found this activity on Pinterest.....a link to the blog can be found here.