Solar System

Solar System

This week our letter is Ss. What better way to start than with the solar system?!

I was really excited about this one and when I told Jared about it, he got pretty excited too. He offered to bring over a book that Nixon liked about the solar system and showed me a song done by the Storybots about it too. We had a bunch of fun!

Book

We used Nixon’s book which included Pluto, though I skipped over that one (only to find out later that, apparently, it’s been reclassified as a planet – oh well). 

We went through the order of the planets and Lucy was really getting into it. Nixon was doing ok but he was obviously itching to play. (I love that he loves to play!)

Flashcards

Reviewing the flashcards was a tiny bit more fun this morning because we had two letters to look at – B and S. Yes, I’ve heard the jokes. Trust me – nothing gets by my husband.

We made our new flashcards and they decided to use “sun” as their code word. S-s-sun.

Song

Then, for our song, we used the Storybots video Jared showed me late last week. Nixon covered his ears (surprise, surprise) by Lucy was loving it and Jared and I were singing along like it was cool. 

We may have had it going still while we did our activity. It’s too fun!

Activity

I’d premade their solar systems for them – all they had to do was color. I wasn’t prepared to teach them how to use glue or scissors yet, so I took the easy way out and premade them. Here’s how I did it:

  1. Print two copies of the planets image I found here
  2. Cut a black piece of paper in half, and glued it together in the middle. I used a 12×12 piece of paper because that’s what I had, but a regular sized piece of paper would work too. It overlapped about a 1/2 inch in the middle. I almost stapled it instead of gluing it, but the glue worked so I didn’t worry about it. If you want to make it into a sort of crown, I would recommend stapling it instead.
  3. I drew the (somewhat) circular lines to help indicate orbits with a silver Sharpee.

They colored them and then headed off to play. My one regret is not making four of them so that Jared and I could have one too. Ha!

All Done!

We seem to be getting into a bit of a groove. The Storybots video was definitely a hit and it was better than any song I was finding. 

There are tons of books out there about the solar system and pretty much all of them work – doesn’t have to be specific to this one. We used this one because we knew that Nixon already liked it.

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