Below are some Circle Time favorites during the Space Unit. We played Alien and Space Man tic-tac-toe. It is always interesting to watch where kids are developmentally, as many just had fun putting a space man or alien in an open space, while others had strategy and real thought in the placement of their piece. We learned about tally marks as we kept score to find out whether space men or aliens won. Alphabet space used blue paper plates with giant capital letters on them. Depending on the class, we threw bean bags into the plates and named the letter or said the sound of the letter on the plate, or we played a space letter hunt. One of our science teacher parents let us borrow their moon, sun, and earth stuffed animals. We used them the practice the orbits around one another. For the M or Not M (picture hard to see below) game, each student got a small white paper plate with a giant M on it. Mrs. D showed pictures to the kids. If the picture began with the /M/ sound, we raised our plates and sang "moon, moon, moon". Before we played the game, we listened to the Laurie Berkner song, "Moon, Moon, Moon". Delicious fruit rocket ships using cut up fruit and a wooden skewer were a hit. Mrs. Bailey's alien puppet made us laugh with silly words and sound play. We learned about things that give us light (such as a light bulb) or do not give us light (such as a book). To learn how craters on the moon were made, we used a tub of flour and large wooden balls. When you drop the wooden ball into the flour tub, the flour goes "poof" and a nice crater hole is made. Their favorite part was the "poof" and then all the mess it made on the floor around the tub! Not pictured was learning how the sun gives us light using a lamp and the globe. We saw that when the earth turns, half the Earth has daytime and the other half has night time. We also saw why we have summer and winter time. Of course, we also had a lot of songs, dancing, and fun fingerplays to go along with space!
GYM TIME
We had a "blast" (yes, pun intended!).
1.) We used blow up space shuttles to play a blast off and landing game. Each child got their own space shuttle to use. They each stood on their own rubber dot on teh floor (their space station). We counted from 10 to BLAST OFF! They got to take off and run around the gym until the space commander (Mrs. D) told them to come in for a landing. They would go back to their space station and wait for the countdown.
2.) After this game, we had simple relay races where one person would stand on one side of the gym, fly across the gym to their waiting partner, and then hand off the shuttle to their partner, who would then take off across the gym to the next waiting person.
3.) The final game was using our bodies on a scooter board. The scooter was our space ship. The kids would lay on their bellies, push their feet up against the wall and then used their feet and legs to push off the wall to "blast off".
