Fun Moon Activities

We've done so many Moon-related activities over the years, I feel like everyone must be quite tired of them—but I guess each one is for a new crop of children! And even the older ones came drifting over when we were doing these activities for Elementary School, saying, "Oh yes…making craters…I love this!"—and before we knew it they were launching chocolate chips into our pudding as well! :)

There are a couple different ways to model craters. One is in pudding, as shown also here. And one is with flour and baking cocoa, which is probably a more accurate way to see phenomena like ejecta patterns and double cratering.

For this model, you just sift a layer of flour into a cake pan, and cover it with a layer of baking cocoa. This allows you to see what happens when the bottom material is disturbed by an impactor, and how the material can be thrown up onto the surface. You can read better instructions here.

Another fun activity—Moon Phase cookies. We originally saw this idea for making moon phases in Oreos, but since we like homemade Oreos much better than real ones, we always make our own. The recipe is at this link (it's really easy!). The only downside is that when the children spread the frosting themselves, it's not quite as neat as when they just carve phases into the pre-made circle of Oreo frosting! But it's fine. They like eating them, anyway. :)

Anyway, everyone had a very good grasp of moon phases, by the end. We filled out these moon charts by looking at the moon every night for a month, and they really had fun with that too.

Playing "moon tennis" with balloons and paper plate paddles—this is an activity we did last time we had this unit that was fun to repeat. I don't know if it really teaches that much about the moon, except that batting a balloon around feels weird, and playing with a ball on the moon probably would feel lighter. Well, anyway, we had fun.

But the MOST fun "moon" activity we did was renting this Bouncy House! Of course this is even more of a stretch, I suppose, learning-wise—but how better to celebrate the moon than bouncing around pretend you're walking on it? We stumbled onto a half-price bounce house rental deal and couldn't pass it up! We've never done anything like this before, so it was VERY exciting and even the older children had a great time!

Ziggy took awhile to warm up to the idea (it was big, and kind of loud because of the fan) but he was definitely fascinated and had LOTS to say and remember about the "bouncy slide" after we returned the rental the next day!

Even Baby Gus got to slide down!

And a bonus picture of the lovely crescent moon, with Venus shining brightly across the temple spire from it. We looked at Venus with the binoculars and were even able to see its phases!