Fly Me to the Moon

“Fly me to the moon
Let me play among the stars
Let me see what spring is like
On a-Jupiter and Mars”

-Frank Sinatra

I’ve had this song in my head since I started my outer space theme last week. I even used it to title my bulletin board 🙂 There are SO many fun projects that can be done with an outer space theme. I will share some of the projects we did last week.

The first project was creating a moon. I got this idea from one of the 3-year old preschool teachers that I was an aide for. I made a concoction of shaving cream, glue, gray and silver liquid watercolor, white paint and a little glitter. This made a nice puffy “paint.”

The kiddos painted with the puffy paint mixture on small circles I had cut out from construction paper. After they painted, they used the bottle cap seen in the picture to make “craters” on their moon.

The next day, I mixed some liquid water color with a small amount of regular blue and green paint and water. The kiddos used the green and blue to paint on a coffee filter to make the Earth. Then we had a little fun with spray bottles. I made a VERY thin mixture of white paint, gold watercolor and water. Again, this mixture was very thin – thin enough to be able to spray out of a spray nozzle. The kiddos used they fine motor skills and hand muscles to squirt the mixture onto black paper. Once everything was dry, they glued their Earth and moon onto their black starry background.

Our other art project was to make an astronaut helmet (out of paper). The kids colored their helmet, I cut them out then attached paper straps to each side.

It was pretty rainy in our neck of the woods last week, so we had some extra inside time. During free choice, the kids were able to paint a rocket ship at the easel. We also happened to have an astronaut dress-up shirt in our dramatic play area. I took the children one by one and had them put on their astronaut helmet they had colored and the astronaut dress up shirt. I asked each of them “If you were an astronaut where would you go or what would you do?” Their answers were recorded on a chalkboard that they held for a picture. The kids loved dressing up and those paper helmets were in pretty rough shape by the end of the day 🙂

Here is a picture of our bulletin board outside our classroom. I have blurred out any faces and names to protect the children’s identities. The only thing I would change is finding a different way to attach the Earth to the black paper. The coffee filters were very thin and you can see all of the glue lines. I think this was one of the most fun themes I have done!

 

 

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