The boys have been on a space kick recently, so I abandoned my neat list of two-week school units and all we've been doing is space, space, space. Rockets, planets, space shuttles, stars, moons, galaxies...whatever we can find and that they'll sit through. I might post a list of the books we've gone through later if anyone is interested, but mostly we just look through whatever we have on the shelves here and whatever they have at the library and then read, reread, reread. And then we talk, talk, talk about what we've been learning.

Tom Swift and His Rocket Ship is our evening read aloud and their oral story is usually either a story about them going into space and visiting planets or is the story of creation.

We've been printing out space coloring sheets (rockets, planets, etc) to color and varying levels of activity. Some days they just color, some days we add star stickers. We've made rockets out of toilet paper tubes. We've assembled our solar system puzzle several times. And today we did a craft I did absolutely no planning for. It just sort of fell together and it worked out well.


I found the planets here : http://s3.amazonaws.com/PCPC/solar-system-01.jpg

They each picked a color of construction paper for asteroids and then cut the asteroids out with a little help for practice with scissors, while I cut out the planets for them. Then we started with Jupiter, Earth, and Mars and they glued those and then glued the asteroid belt in the middle. Then I gave them the rest of the planets and the sun and let them sort them onto which side of the belt they belonged on. 

We've also watched For All Mankind about the lunar missions over at Hulu+ and we've watched this NASA video about the Mars Rover Curiosity a few times. 

God's been really renewing my sense of wonder and amazement at His power and the beauty of His creation as we study this-- I've been learning things, too! It's just mind boggling how HUGE it all really is and how easy it is to forget. It's funny to me how feeling that wonder and awe at God's handiwork awakens in me the desire to create! What a powerful God we serve!