Spacing Out

Welcome to the adventures of me attempting to teach on the subject of:
SPACE

Buckle  your seatbelts, folks, it's gonna be a weird ride.

 When I start a curriculum, I usually go to the library and look up all the books I can find about the subject the kids chose for that month.
Then I use the books as a guideline. I don't know about your library, but mine lets me borrow up to 50 books at a time for a whole month.
I try to find all the info I can on the subject and I try to find age/grade- appropriate material for my students. I also look for themes within themes and break down the month into weeks, giving each week a focused topic to explore within those sub-themes. For instance, When you're talking about space, you can learn about the stars and constellations, galaxies, our solar system-- all the main planets and then the dwarf ones, the moon, space exploration and shuttles and other space crafts, etc...
So I found books that covered all of these, then decided which to go over on which days, and which weeks.
I also then decide if there is a craft of some sort that would further explore that topic per day. And/or any other activity we could do, like music or a physical game. I plan out the month week by week, then day by day, breaking down each area of learning.


To start off, we began with learning about NASA, and what it would be like to go up into space. I read this book to them, which was geared for their grade-level.

Then I assigned them a paper on what they would like about being an astronaut, and what they wouldn't.

Then we did this art project.

I found a series of books that were perfect for my lessons, one book per planet, and other points of education in the solar system:

These are full of info I myself did not realize. The info is a couple years behind, so due to some of the space probes having sent back newer info since publication, there might be even better info out there in cyberworld. Perhaps, but these are still good resources nonetheless.

We read one book each day, and then did a corresponding art project of that planet per day. For instance, we learned that Mercury is a planet full of craters, since it has such a thin atmosphere that any meteorites just fly right through it and crash into the planet. So we made the planet look crater-full by sponge painting.

 We are attempting to construct a mobile out of these, the two planets, one made by each of the kids, will get glued back to back and we'll just have one planet each. So I tried to make each of them proportionate to each other, as best as possible.
 Here's Venus, which we learned is very cloudy with a very thick atmosphere, so we used marble painting to represent the swirls of the clouds, in the colors the book said it looks like:

 Venus is the only planet to be named after a Roman goddess. All the other ones are named after male gods.

 Next, we learned that the Earth is made up of a bunch of Tectonic Plates put together like a puzzle, so we made the Earth by gluing scraps of blue and green paper together like a tectonic mosaic:

We also learned that Venus and Earth are about the same size, with Earth being only sightly bigger.

Next we learned that Mars is rusty red- looking and full of volcanoes. So we used splatter paint to show the mountains and volcanoes on red paper, to show the rusty color:

The next planet order away from the sun is Jupiter. It is HUGE  compared to the 4 previous "terrestrial" planets. It is the 1st of the next 4 Gas Giants. So proportionately, it is much bigger to the other ones.
We learned that Jupiter is a bit "stripey" due to its storms and gas layers. we painted stripes onto the biggest piece of cardboard we had in the house, that I cut into a circle of a giant Tupperware(tm) lid I had, with an Exacto(tm) knife.

We tried to make it as big as possible with the supplies that we had, to make it proportionately big enough in comparison to the Earth, but it isn't quite big enough. Close, though, they get the idea.
Here's our Earth and Jupiter comparison:

And here is the book's version:

As you can see, their Earth is a lot smaller in comparison. Oh well, we did our best, eh?

After that, Saturn is just a little bit smaller than Jupiter. I found this cool project online to use CDs and Styrofoam balls to make the planet Saturn,

 but I realized part-way through the project, that I bought the Styrofoam to be the right size proportionately to Jupiter, and the CDs were way too small in that case. Had I gauged all the planets to be proportionate to each other on Saturn's rings being the size of the CD, Mercury would have had to start out so small it would have been very difficult to work with at all. So I simply found a big piece of poster board and cut into a circle big enough to look like the rings around the ball. Thusly:

 Here is what our Saturn looks like in comparison to the CDs we were going to use:

 It had to be bigger. This is the only planet that turned out 3D. All the others are 2D images, double-sided sandwich style.

Uranus is a large planet that is blue from the amount of methane gas that comprises it. Also, the planet is tilted on its axis so that its North and South are sideways compared to the other 7 planets. Like so:

Interesting fact: Uranus is the only planet to be named after a Greek god instead of  a Roman planet.

The technique  we used to make the swirly pattern of the clouds was to use a tissue-cloth like rag-painting. We tried to leave the ring white, but ended up painting white over it.

 Neptune is a blue-green mixture because it has methane and other gases, and it is very cloudy.
To get the look, and because of the appropriate size coordinating with the other planets,  we used a format of using a coffee filter and markers, then spraying it with water to cause the marker to 'bleed' a bit.

According to the newest findings, Neptune is the farthest planet from the sun in our solar system and there are a least 3 Dwarf planets. 


After learning about all the planets, I asked the 3rd grader (my son) to write a report about the planets in the solar system, including about 2 sentences of facts per planet. This should not have been a big deal, but to him it was.

 You see, part of the reason for homeschooling is his lack of focus on the writing part. He will learn all the facts by any means necessary. Reciting, using physical demonstration, arts and crafts, song and dance, games, you name it. But ask him to sit down and write out paragraphs is cruel and unusual punishment to the utmost degree. Also, he refused to write in cursive, apparently that would have been 10x worse.  So we are working on it. This is the part of the 'home schooling rocks, sometimes' that is not rocking. 
I'm gonna be real here, folks. We spent ALL DAY on this. We started at our normal 2ish o'clock school time (during toddler/baby naps) and we "finished" at 10:00pm.  P.M.! Not even joking. We took a break during dinner to eat, but that was maybe 1/2 hour. He just won't pick up the pencil, put it to paper, and keep working. UGH! So that is the frustration I am going through. It isn't anything like perfect around here. I want to be transparent, and not give some illusion that I am super-mom and setting the standard or anything. We struggle. We don't so much some days. But we are flexible and that is what homeschooling is all about. I know the set standard of school is something that might just kill my son. I want him to have a learning experience that actually help him learn. But sometimes I don't want to do it anymore. It is hard. 


Have faith, we will continue on. And I will show him that this project didn't kill him...