Blast Off Into Space All Month Long With Woolsey Academy!

Our preschool learning and fun takes us to outer space all month long!  This week we are studying "Space from Earth" as we discover the stars, sun, moon, astronomers, and comets!

Basic Concepts To Reinforce At Home:

Letters: Rr, Ss, and Zz
Numbers: 13 and 14
Color: Yellow
Shape: Star

Of course we have lots of music, songs, stories, arts and crafts, dramatic play, and S.T.E.M. in store for our little learners as we BLAST OFF into another play-filled month of curiosity!

​Just look at what we have done so far!

Constellations Mapping and Star Size Recognition

I LOVE the interactive and engaging method for teaching our young learners to recognize small, medium, and large stars WHILE becoming familiar with patterns high in the sky!  We received these from our education partners at Mother Goose Time and they were an instant hit! So far we have learned to recognize the constellations Cassiopeia, Andromeda,  Orion, and the Big Dipper!  You can help make this come to life as you take me outside and gaze at the stars pointing these out as you see them in the night sky!

Oh Mister Sun, Sun, Mister Golden Sun....

We discovered that the sun is a fiery ball of gas that is VERY big!  We painted with red and yellow and observed that as we swirled the colors together they made shades of orange.  We learned that the 3-D shape of the sun is a sphere, but that we were making our suns on "circle's".  Even our littlest bitty was able to join in the this science and sensory painting experience.

Up In Space! A Counting Book by Chris Lensch

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"Up In Space, A Counting Book," by Chris Lensch has to be one of my FAVORITE new space books.  It includes the names of the planets, simple facts about gas planets and rock planets, and it counts backward, then forward and back again!  It is an educator's dream for reinforcing math and science in a beautifully illustrated piece of preschool literature!  

Thank you, Mother Goose Time for providing this for us educators! 

Our "Number Stars" game work seamlessly with "Up In Space!"

We played this sweet and simple game two ways.  First, we used the cards with our glow in the dark stars to count one to one recognizing the number on each card and then counting correctly the corresponding number of starts.  

Secondly, we used our cards and lined them up in order from 1-10 and then from 10-1, making sure each number was in it's proper place!

Our own little telescopes help encourage us to star gaze!

Many of our little learners immediately turned our bright blue and star stickered cylinders into megaphones, hooting and hollering to their neighbors.  But many understood the concept of what a telescope is and that it helps us to see far into outer space.  We were excited to take these home and look up into the night sky to see the planets, moon, and stars!

We will continue to discover comets and asteroids in the coming days, rock planets, gas planets, and methods of how we research and study about the galaxies all around us. 

We are moving and grooving our way through March with some exploration, discovery, and most importantly....play.

As always, we wish you well and we hope you get to play today! - L