nighttime sky recap

Our school year began on Monday and we had a great first week back! This year Desmond is a kindergartner and Zoey is a 3rd grader! I have a lot of awesome stuff planned for this year and I'm really excited about it.

For the last couple of years we have followed Exploring Nature with Children for our nature studies. It's a week by week nature study and I love that even though we have done the same curriculum twice now, it's different every year due to it being open ended. I love the community aspect of this curriculum and I love the deep appreciation for nature that my children have developed. This last week was Summer Nighttime Sky Week, so I thought i'd recap what we did.

We used a Lite-Brite to form different constellations. The kids discovered it was more fun to sit in the dark bathroom and form them. This kept them entertained for a very long time!

I paired Nighttime Sky Week with learning about Vincent Van Gogh. Our Van Gogh unit is for two week so I will post more in depth about that later but I had to show you the awesome art project they did of a starry sky. We followed this tutorial for melted crayon art. It was so fun and the kids had amazing results! 

I always try to do a couple "invitations to play" each week to help spark the imagination. I used some glass and wooden beads in galaxy colors from the dollar store along with some star shapes and play dough for an easy nighttime sky theme. It's also fun to add alphabet stamps to stamp into the play dough!

We used play dough to form the animal shapes and then beads to form the location of the stars. We used toothpicks to dot the lines connecting the stars. This was a major hit!

We used our geoboards and rubber bands to form the constellations. These were tricky but the kids had fun figuring out how to manipulate the bands to create the shapes they needed.

We also downloaded the Night Sky app to scan the sky and locate constellations. This app is incredible! We highly recommend!

I loved this week long study because I learned along with the kids and it didn't require a lot of materials. We used what we had on hand and we had an amazing learning experience! Below are links to items we used. I hope this was helpful! You can also follow my constellation pinterest board here.

Books:

• What We See in the Stars by Kelsey Oseid
• Find the Constellations by H.A. Rey
• Nature Anatomy by Julia Rothman
• Zoo in the Sky: A Book of Animal Constellations by Jacqueline Mitton

Printables:

• DIY Constellation Projector 
• Constellation Watercolor Flashcards from Fiddlesticks Education
• Constellations Nature Guide from Brave Grown Home

Videos:

• Constellations from SciShow Kids
• Constellation Locations from Crash Course Kids
• Myth of Orion from Free School