Fun Science Activities with Reading and Writing

Saturday, October 26, 2013

It felt good to have a full week of school!  Sometimes short weeks are more challenging than full ones.  Don't get us wrong, we're exhausted, but a good exhausted.

Reading and writing revolved around science this week. We are wrapping up our science unit on the solar system. The students loved this unit, and enthusiastically participated in all activities. Mensa For Kids puts out great science activities to learn about the moon, and we did several of them. We did an experiment to discover why the moon has craters and why they are different sizes, we read interesting facts about the moon and rated them, and then we made a model of a moon using water colors and wrote about it.

The constellations were a big hit as well. We used the jigsaw strategy when reading a book about the stars. The students had to highlight important information the author wanted them to learn, and then each group shared information about their chapter with the rest of the class. A fun hands-on activity was making constellation tubes and star finders. To check their understanding we did a five minute power write about constellations.

The solar system was the final topic in our unit. Using the game twenty questions, the students had to guess what was in the two giant garbage bags. A blow-up sun and planets were in the bag. The students went crazy! We sang a song to help us put the planets in order. You probably have heard the song before, but here it is. It is sung to the tune Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star. We don't know who wrote the song, so we can't give credit where credit is due. Every time we placed a new planet in its order, we sang the song, because this was the target goal for the lesson.

Mercury, Venus, Earth, and Mars,

These are the planets among the stars

Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus too

Neptune, Pluto

Now we're through

Planets are in the Milky Way

This is what we learned today.

Yes, we know Pluto is not a planet anymore, and the students remind us of that constantly, but it goes with song, and Pluto is still there.

We found a cute new art project on Pinterest to help us remember the order of the planets. Last year we made a candy model, this year it was a construction paper model.

The planets can orbit around the sun.  They have to hold onto one leg of the brad and spin the black paper.

We also watched this very entertaining movie from YouTube. The speakers' accents are a little difficult to understand, but the students didn't seem to have a problem with it, and it does have some cool facts.

Next week we will tell you about our Snapple-Lid Reading Party.  It was great fun and we learned about it at the Smekens' conference!!!

Kim and Anne