Earth, Moon and Space

Recently me and the boys went to a moon landing exhibition. It was really hands on and we had a fantastic time. We have spent the last week remembering different facts from the day and started to collect materials to reproduce a few of the activities we did.

Today while we were playing outside the boys spotted the moon in the sky. My eldest asked why half of it was 'missing' so I started explaining about the phases of the moon and he remembered things from the trip last week. He ran off to get a telescope so he could see better. Unfortunately we don't have a telescope so we decided to try and make one!. After finding the broken magnifying glass and a cardboard tube we fashioned something that resembled a telescope and the boys took turns trying to see the moon's craters. After a while I decided to get my camera and do a super zoom photo to see what we could see of the moon - unfortunately no craters.

Then I remembered the space torch we got my youngest for his birthday so we sat in the darkened corridor to view all the photos. It was even better as there are several shots of the moon landing including the foot print that they seem to have loved from the exhibit (you can find the torch here). 

This led me to try reproducing the footprint in our sandpit. This was so funny and we all had a good laugh while they tried to stride around in my big boot with crayons taped under (to make the right sort of groove).

After, we coloured in two polystyrene balls I had to represent the earth and the moon. We discussed the countries we had to add to the earth and the names of the oceans then remembered that the moon had craters and the big boy asked about the protective bubble that protects the earth from comets and meteors and why earth doesn't have craters like the moon. I was really surprised by how much information they both remembered from the day trip and how excited they were to try all these activities in their own home. When the earth and moon were ready they practiced rotating around each other being the earth or moon and this had them in fits of giggles as they got dizzy and fell down over and over!

Later on they asked to watch a moon movie and I remembered that there are several parts of a documentary called Cosmos that have nice images about earth and the moon. We enjoyed most of it although some of the cartoon parts were a bit overwhelming so we skipped past those!

For our bedtime reading I asked if they had any books about planets or space and they remembered a book about a boy who goes to Mars. It's called Marshmallows for Martians and was a great way to finish our day before turning off the lights for another look at the torch images.

I'm sure they will want to repeat many of these activities tomorrow and I will be coming up with a few more to compliment these (I will try and add them to this post later).