Planets, Stars and Space... Oh My! (giveaway and freebies)

We made it through another week! Man these kiddos have been all sorts of crazy! We've spent the last few weeks learning all about the solar system and snowmen. Quite the combination, right? This year our school has gone to a school-wide science theme schedule. Each month we have a focus, which is taught K-5. There is a list of vocabulary words for each focus, and the thought is that by 5th grade, the kids will have a strong grasp on all of the words. Of course, each grade has their own twist on the theme, and we only teach what is grade appropriate. To be honest, so months have been more fun than others, but it seems to be working well so far.

This month our focus has been the solar system. I haven't taught this since my very first year teaching, so it was so fun to revisit! Our goal was to introduce the kids to the concept of the solar system, but to mostly just focus on the 8 planets. We want them to know their names, the order of the planets, and a few facts about each. We've also introduces the earth's orbits, and rotations. The kids have had a blast, and we have as well. Here are a few activities that we've done with them.
Click {HERE} to get a copy of our planet book.
The first graders water colored the planets, and then made a poster out of them.
We made a few posters of all of the planet facts we've learned.
This next week our school is having a door decorating contest to celebrate Love of Reading Month. Since we were on a space kick, we kept the theme going with STAR: Sit, Think and Read. Each rocket shows a picture of a student reading, and we included another set of water colored planets to really make it look like space.
This isn't ours, but had to share. One of our 5th grade students made this INCREDIBLE model of the solar system. This picture really doesn't do it justice. (*I apologize for the photo quality btw, I left my camera at home and had to use my phone for many pics.) The bright stars are actually Christmas lights. Isn't it cool?

And of course this isn't all we've done. We loved this theme so much that we had to create a fun unit to go along with it! Introducing our newest baby, Planets, Stars and Space... Oh My! She is a 70 page unit packed with planet-themed activities, and lessons for teaching your first graders all about the planets. Included in this unit:

*planet posters

*planet game board & cards

*”BLAST” sight word game

*fact family activities (3)

-including worksheets

*addition/subtraction game

*mnemonic device poster

*original mini-book

*Planet report

*Planet riddles

*planet cards

*inner & outer planet activities

*sentence builders

*Word sort

*color & b/w printable planets

Here's a little preview of what you'll get!

Click {HERE} or on the picture below to head on over to our store to check out our Planet Pack.

Need some Solar System vocabulary cards? Check these out!
Make sure to grab these for free too!
Vocab Cards

We ended our week by incorporating one of our Snowman Fun Pack math activities into our day today, and boy was it fun! We began by retelling Sneezy the Snowman and then we conducted our own data experiment by tasting one of Sneezy's favorite foods, ICE CREAM! We brought in four flavors and each of our students had a sample.

Next our kiddos colored an ice cream scoop that represented their favorite flavor out of the four flavors that we tried. Then we grouped the scoops to view our data.

You can definitely see that each of our classes had completely different data! Our kids were surprised to find out that the other classes most favorite was different than their own.

Finally we recorded our data, answered questions, and created a bar graph that was attached to their packets (sorry we didn't get any graph pics).

This was such a fun math activity and our kids really had fun. They couldn't believe we could complete a math lesson and eat ice cream too! We can't wait to do this again next year! Interested in checking this unit out, you can look {HERE} and read all about it!

Before we head off to bed, we'd love to host a quick giveaway! We'd love to give a lucky follower a copy of our Planets, Stars and Space Unit. So leave a comment with your favorite science theme to teach, and we will draw 2 lucky winners on Monday night, February 6th. Good luck!

We hope you all have a great weekend! We'll be back soon...