Moon Bouncing

We just started learning about the moon a few weeks ago, and this week I hit upon an idea that has been SO fun. We began fighting an epic battle against the MOON MONSTER! :) The Moon Monster is an evil rumor- spreader who wants to tarnish the moon's good name. If you're interested in buying this activity, purchase here. 

So ... we sorted the fact from the fiction {at least, what we thought was the fact and fiction}. This sort is part of a larger moon rumors unit I'm working on, but for now the bouncing activity is up and ready on TpT!





















And ... jumped right into {literally} as we fought to show the moon DOES have gravity {contrary to popular opinion}.

We moon bounced, and then did several follow up activities tied to our mathematics unit - we first measured the length of our jumps (some groups measured to the nearest inch, some to the nearest half and inch, and some to the nearest fourth of an inch), then added up our measurements to find the total. This gave us valuable practice adding with expanded form, some pre-teaching of adding fractions and converting measurements from inches to feet.





Don't you love it when something you've planned builds on many more skills than you initially planned? I was happy with integrating math and science, but MAN - when we started adding fractions and practicing converting those 16 inches to feet + inches .... my teaching heart SANG. :)

Finally - some of us used multiplication to practice finding out how far we would have bounced (3x the distance), and an imaginary planet where the gravity is 22x weaker than Earth!











By the time we were done, one of my sweet boys gave me the ultimate compliment - "This was math?!" Misson: accomplished. :)