Rock Planets!

This week we began by learning that all planets fall into one of two categories. They are all either gas planets or rock planets and this week we focused on the rock planets.

But first....we had to learn one of my ALL TIME FAVORITE space songs.  It is from the old Blue's Clues shows.  This one never gets old...just take a look and a listen!

One of our darling astronauts!

"The Sun's a hot star, Mercury's hot too; 
Venus is the brightest planet!
Earth's home to me and YOU!!
Mars is the red one, and Jupiter's most wide.
Saturn's got those icy rings and Uranus spins on it's side!
Neptune's really windy, and Pluto's very small (yes, we know it is now classified as a dwarf planet!!).
Well we wanted to name the planets and now we've named them all!!"

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One of the things I LOVE about studying space with preschooler's is that there is a WEALTH of great children's literature on the subject like this one!

And this one!

We were immersed in space words like "Sun", "Earth" and "Mars" with our emergent reader book from Mother Goose Time!

I love the word pointers that emphasize our site words like "look", "up", and "and".  They draw attention to our special words and make it easy for our little learners to find their site words in these emergent readers and in our other space books too.  We use them to write the words and turn it into a matching game.

In addition to stories and songs we received some new Tangram puzzles from our curriculum partners at Mother Goose Time with a special space theme.

We built rockets, a space station, the Sun, and astronauts using diamonds, squares, circles,triangles, and hexagons! Our preschoolers played this again and again and it is the perfect way to teach shapes minus the flashcards!  We observed how we can use shapes to make pictures of things we recognize!!

Tangram puzzles are amazing for developing a math and logic minds and we utilize them daily here at Woolsey Academy. 

"During my psychology training, one of my lecturers used to say that if you gave a child no other math instruction bar Tangrams for one whole year, they would be more advanced mathematically than if you followed the regular math curriculum. The simplicity of this bold statement has stuck with me ever since. Imagine if something as simple and fun as playing with Tangrams could really advance math skills more than a year of regular instruction?! While I have not found anyone willing to try this experiment (yet!), I recently employed Tangrams in my Math Genius club with great success."https://catherinehallissey.com/2012/12/21/tangrams-the-easy-way-to-develop-mathematical-thinking-skills/  

These seemingly simple puzzles are full of potential and possibilities.  They are easily configured to any topic and can be reused and redesigned as the child's logic grows.  

Math, Science, Music, Movement, and Literature! This was a great beginning to our week studying the rock planets!

As always, we wish you well and we hope you get to play today.

L