Study Notebooks: Space!

Every quarter we keep track of our learning in our social studies or science unit, and share them at our Community Night. What I love most about our notebooks is that they accumulate and make a wonderful record of the learning and growth that child has made over the time that they've been at our school.

We start with a blank Bare Book, and slowly add either journal entries, activities or diagrams. When it's complete, we decorate the cover with a fun design that represents that quarter's work. Since I've shared all our moon work {here, here, and here}, it's clear our last unit had to do with space. Soooo .... our cover was the night sky and moon! 

I was excited to try this technique I saw on Pinterest. The author calls it "puffy paint ..." I call it FUN!!

First you take a big dollop of shaving cream, and add some glue: 

You take some construction paper (we used light blue to give it some color), and smear it around! 

It only takes a couple of hours to dry, and then you can cut it into any shape you want! 

For the background of our books we used a dry tempera pat to create a wash, and then we used a tissue to wipe most of it off: 

When it was dry, we added some glitter paint and wrote the names and ... voila! The adorable covers, each one slightly unique. 

Inside ... our learning! We started the unit by visiting NASA's space station site for kids - we learned what a day in the life of an astronaut would be like, then we made our own packing list: 

We started waayyyyy out in space, and made acrostic poems about galaxies:

 

Then we moved in a little and studies constellations, using two AWESOME resources that I HIGHLY recommend - first we activated our schema and learned about constellations with the "Solar System Spectacular" unit by Lesson Plan SOS, and after we'd learned a little about them, we created our own with the ingenius "Graphing the Constellations" packet from Anna Colley.

After constellations, we moved onto stars, learning about their brightness, color, and life cycle using my "Stars" unit.

 

 

We zoomed into our solar system, learning about our own sun and it's characteristics - the layers of the sun and movement through the sky, as well as its effect on shadows and seasons. 

  

Fiinnnaaallly we started our moon work - we debunked ten "moon rumors" with my "Moon Misconceptions" unit - all of which are documented here, here, and here. OH! And we used the totally adorable oreo cookie activity from Yvonne Dixon's "Sun, Moon, Earth ..." unit, and the ADORABLE moon and earth craftivity from Leah Abatiell's "Mr. Moon" unit. I wish I had pictures! 

Have you seen this little poem? So helpful! 

We culminated our unit with our Community Night, packed it all up and started all over again the next week! Onto ENERGY, forces and motion and MATTER. Bring it on, science! :) 

Exploring the Moon's Characteristics

We've just completed a really fun unit - as you saw in my community sharing post, we've just wrapped up our space unit. As a teacher, some of the *best* weeks/months in the classroom are times when I'm able to integrate all our learning together into one integrated unit. Thanks gosh for inspiration late in the evening one Saturday night. {You know those nights you lay in bed, and can't shut off your brain?} Moon misconceptions!

I set it up with my kids by telling them something horrible happened! We were attacked by an awful moon monster, spreading TEN vicious rumors about the moon - things like, "The moon is made of cheese,"  "There is a man in the moon," "The moon changes shape in the sky." Can you believe it? They are precious, and love play-acting like this. 

Lucky for us we had several non-fiction reading articles, math measurement experiments, and science experiments to help us fight this ruthless rumor-mongerer.  ;)  Two of the activities we did were "the man in the moon" article reading and math craftivity to prove there's nobody living there and a "moon bounce" experiment to prove the gravity on the moon ...

We also did some pretty fun other things -- read other non-fiction articles, completed experiments, even made our own sweet moon model treat!

Moon experiment to explore phases of the moon. 

Ebbinghaus illusion - the reason the moon looks bigger than the stars around it.

Ingredients set up for our creation of our very own moon model made from crispy rice treats. :)  

Completed moon layers! YUM! 

It was a smashing success, and something I'm pretty excited to continue when we learn about energy and forces in motion this upcoming week. I guess there's always a chance this rumor monster could return ... ;)

If you're interested in completing the man in the moon and moon bouncing activity with your kids, you can find them here at my TpT store,  but the best deal is the full "moon misconceptions" unit that includes those two activities, plus our fact and fiction pre- and post- test sort, along with all the correlating activities to dispel the TEN rumors that horrible moon monster put into the world {it's a huge unit - 60 pages full of moon fun!!}.

Happy learning!

The Man in the Moon

I am LOVING learning about space! Especially the moon, because it seems like everything can be related to the moon. One thing I struggle to teach is non-fiction reading and strategies, specifically those in articles, primarily because the articles I find are usually either a) too easy b) too hard or c) too boring c) not appropriate for second graders.

SOooooOO ... I wrote my own! Seriously I don't know why I didn't do this sooner. So silly - I can tailor the "article" to teach any subject matter I want AND I can add or take away challenging vocabulary and text structures. Plus it takes WAY less time than searching the Internet Machine {my best friend calls it that and makes me giggle every time}.

I projected the article for the whole-group debrief.

Above is our anchor chart for summarizing fiction vs. summarizing non-fiction. We have two options when summarizing non-fiction - answering the "5 Ws and H" or using the main idea and several details. {I'm partial to the main idea and details option ... }

After that little brainstorm, I kept thinking - why not integrate our math time? We needed more measurement practice, so VOILA! The Man in the Moon unit was born.


We studied the rumor ... read the article, found cause and effect, main idea of each paragraph and then summarized. Then we created our own moon men using rulers and good old fashioned team work {never hurts}. I love the results!

Face options for the moon men.

I didn't get a completed picture - so sad!