Tots and Me... Growing Up Together: School Time With My Father's World Week 6: Unit 2- Mm Moon

Unit 2- Mm Moon Part 1

Words to remember: I am the light of the world.

While last week we learned that the sun gives us light and heat, this week we learned that the moon reflects the sun's light to give us light at night. In the same way, Jesus is the light of the world and we are to reflect that light.

We had fun learning that the moon is made up of rock and there is a layer of dust. We also discussed that there are craters on the moon. We used the World Book Encyclopedia to read some fun facts.

One of the ideas I found on the MFW message boards was to take a pan of flour and have the children drop pebbles in it to form craters. Of course I thought this was a great idea. As I do not tell the girls what letter we are doing prior to the lesson I thought I would have a little fun with them. I figured if I asked them to go gather some pebbles they might think we were doing the letter P. Then I thought they might think it was F because of the flour. Nope, they didn't even think about it. Oh well, they discovered we were doing Mm by using their sense of touch and reaching inside the feeling pouch. They each had a different idea of what the letter would be. Tabitha thought it was a "w" and Amelia thought it was an "E," daddy of course had to be silly and say he had thought it was a "3." So, it was a bit of a surprise anyway.

Here are the pictures of Tabitha dropping the pebbles in the "moon dust."

I also made the girls a M-Moon muffin tin. The swiss cheese represented the craters on the moon, as did the holes in the mushroom. And the marshmallows are moon rocks.

On Wednesday we made "Moon Cake" for Kids and a Mom in the Kitchen.

(This is a weekly linky I have. I invite you to stop by and link up any kid friendly recipes or time you spend in the kitchen with your children)

This recipe was also found on the MFW message board. It was so much fun to make.

We read a book called Sun and Moon by Marcus Pfister. The sun and the moon are both sad because they don't have any friends. The earth tries to give them ideas of who could be there friend (wind, rainbow and children for the sun, stars, comets and children for the moon) but none of the ideas will work. Then the sun and the moon become friends, even though they only see each other at the beginning or end of the day. Until one day they met during an eclipse.

We got out a lamp to be the sun, our globe and a ball for the moon. We saw how the sun shines on the moon which gives light to the earth. We also saw how the moon orbits the earth.

Then we used some playdough on a stick (okay a pencil) to show how the eclipse works. I got this idea from the book Experiments with the Sun and the Moon by Salvatore Tocci

Friday we talked about the relative size of the moon. We used the instructions in the teacher's manual to get the correct ratios. The moon was a tiny 1/8 inch circle. The earth was a 1/2 inch circle. The girls measured to place the moon and the sun 14 inches apart.

Then we got out a sheet (because I wasn't going to use a ton of precious paper) and folded it to approximate the 4 1/2 feet we needed for the size of the sun.

We then took it all outside.

We put the sun at the entrance to the park (which is right behind our house).

I had the girls run down to the other end of the park to show me how far away they thought the earth would be. They chose the dirt pile behind the trees by the old swings.

Then Tabitha and I used a necklace that had just broken and measured approximately 4 feet in length to measure 490 feet.

Amelia, in the meantime, found a couple of branches to play with.

And Hannah was having fun putting twigs into playdough. Harold stayed calm the entire time. He really does enjoy being outdoors.

I had the girls stand on the spot where the earth would be.

And they looked back to where the sun was.

As you can see from the picture below, the girls were extremely close in guessing that the dirt pile would be the correct distance. At the bottom of the picture is our earth/moon paper that was placed at 490 feet. So they called the dirt pile Mars and had to climb it. I think the thought of climbing the dirt pile is what kept them going. That took quite the while measuring out the distance.

Of course here are some pictures of our M activities. Tabitha showing Hannah the word cards. Once again Hannah and Amelia alternated finding the picture card.

And putting it on the poster.

We used our "moon dust" to write our letter M in.

I found items that started with M for our feely pouch.

We had one day of worksheet time this week during Hannah's nap. The older girls do their calendar and 100 chart at this time. Then they did their handwriting page and their sound discrimination page.