Community Share Night: Looking Up ..

Every quarter at my school, we present all the learning we've done in our social studies/science unit for that quarter. We all have a theme we focus on, and then center several presentations around this theme. This quarter the theme is "Looking Up ..." and our grade level learned all about the stars, sun, moon, and earth. I LOVED it - I taught in North Carolina for the last four years, and was always jealous of the all the fun things teachers did with the space theme. Lucky for me, it's a second grade standard in Georgia!

For this community night, every grade level creates several presentations - either visual, musical, or theatrical arts. We usually do a combination of all these - two to three visual presentations and a performance or two - maybe a reader's theater, song, or video presentation the kids have worked on. This time we have three visual walls and the kids will sing a song at the end of the night. Specifically, one of the songs from Kids Know It - have you seen this site before? So cute. We'll be singing, "The Color of a Star," but there are a TON of other songs that can add a little spice to the classroom. {Especially for non-musical people like me!}

Our first presentation wall is centered on the life cycle of a star. The kids all created a 3D home project, and brought it in this Monday for the wall. All I can say is oh. my. gosh. The creativity! They always blow me away with their at-home projects. A few examples -- 

That ball in the upper right-hand corner? It's a pulsar and it blinks. :) 

The student who made this one called it a "glitter bomb." :) 

Love the use of a balloon as a red giant here. : ) 

Personally, I think THIS one is the glitter bomb.

We took projects from all the classes and mounted them onto the wall ... 

One of our other walls is a presentation of the sun - complete with our own sun mosaics, a 3D representation of the sun, our mobile Sun-Earth-Moon projects, as well as the pictures from our cantaloupe sun projects. {Pinterest idea, yes!} The only things we don't have up yet are the labels for the layers of the sun. 

No labels yet, but we'll get there! 

Have you seen the sun layers project circling around Pinterest? Too cute! All we needed were a few cantaloupes cut in half, toothpicks, and sticky white labels. We labelled the core, radiative zone, convection zone, chromosphere, photosphere, corona and sunspots/solar flares. The kids loved it - and we had a spirited debate about which part of the cantaloupe should be labelled the radiative zone vs. convection zone. I wish I could find the source of this idea, but the link doesn't lead back to a site! Boo. 

I'll be back soon withe pictures from the rest of our night!