Outer Space Lesson Plans

This Outer Space unit was out of this world!

Many thanks to:

Jolanthe for her Astronaut Preschool Pack

Carisa for her Solar System Learning Pack

Totally Tots for lots and lots of other ideas

and the Space Pack from Musings of Me

I divided the two-week unit in the following way:

Monday – Tuesday: Take Off! Rockets and Astronauts

Wednesday: First Stop: The Moon

Thursday: The Moon

Friday: The Sun

Monday – Tuesday: Stars and Constellations

Wednesday – Friday: The Planets

We enjoyed several of NASA’s Our World video clips.

(Vivienne recommends the clip about the astronauts having to exercise in order to prevent muscle atrophy.)

We used many ideas from Eye on the Sky and this NASA site, too.

We also enjoyed The Magic School Bus: The Secrets of Space project pack and read The Magic School Bus Chapter Book: Space Explorers.

You’ll find most (if not all) of these ideas and printables inside of those links.

Build a Rocket Game

We sang “Five Little Astronauts” every morning.

The girls loved poking the astronauts into the Styrofoam moon…. for two weeks… it never grew old!

Spaceship USA (made out of an orange juice bottle!)

ABC Matching

Making Craters!

Oreo Cookie Phases of the Moon

How Big is the Sun? 1 dot = 1 earth

109 dots later…

Conclusion: The Sun is very, very big. We are very, very small.

The girls enjoyed making random constellations and creating myths to explain the shape. (We spent hours with our library books that explained the stories behind the stars. Vivienne, especially, found these fascinating. What a delight to walk out on the front porch at night and find those stories above our heads.)

Of course, the unit wouldn’t be complete without a super-fun sensory tub!

Big hits: 3-D Planets in a Tube and the Safari LTD Space Toob. Everything else I found at our surprisingly-space-focused Dollar Store!