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!

Sun and Eclipse Unit Study

Before we went on our short trip to Idaho to see the solar eclipse (which was AMAZING—you can read about it here on my other blog), I decided to squeeze in a short unit on the sun and eclipses. A lot of this was review for the older kids, but it was new to the younger ones, and we all had fun with the models. I had some good ideas that I never got to use (eclipse cookies, for one) but there just wasn't enough time! Maybe for the eclipse in 2024 we'll use them. Or in 2045! Will I still be homeschooling in 2045! Ha! It feels like it. But since Ezekiel would be…let's see…28? by then—let's hope I'm taking a well-deserved rest.

This yardstick model was fun and easy to make. You can find the instructions here. You make a clay ball for the earth, and another ball, 1/4 of its size, for the moon. You clip them on the yardstick 30 inches apart. Then you use sunlight (or electric light) to make the moon cast a shadow on the sun. I really liked this because it showed how small the "dot" of totality is at any one time.

Here's another cool model, for which I got the idea here. This is an illustration of why the moon phases appear the way they do on earth, which is something that seems simple, and I've thought I understood long ago—but when I actually tried to think it through, I couldn't explain it satisfactorily. This model makes it perfectly clear that it is our perspective, looking "out" from earth, that causes the different phases.

As you can see by looking at the black foam board, from above, the moon always faces its same side toward the sun. The same side is always lit (represented by the white sides of the ping-pong balls). But when you stick your head in the hole and look outward, you see the perspectives I pasted around the black foam board (on the photos with words). I just stuck my head in and took pictures as I turned around so you could see: crescent, half, gibbous, full, and new moon. It's also pretty clear from this model why a solar eclipse can only happen at New Moon, and a lunar eclipse happens at Full Moon. 

If you want to reinforce the solar/lunar eclipse difference, you might like these worksheets we used for diagramming them. (Scroll down a bit to this picture:)

Sebastian also used this foam board model to show how the solar eclipse worked. He just moved the camera around to make the moon block out the sun in successive stages. The eclipse we saw had the moon moving from right to left across the sun, as Sebastian showed above (compare with this picture below):

Only it was really more of a diagonal, starting in the right upper quadrant of the sun and moving downward. [Time proceeds, in this picture, from left to right.]

We had a surprising amount of fun (considering that we aren't, ahem, all preschoolers) doing this fiery sun painting project. Instructions are here, and it's really easy: just cut out a white circle and squeeze blobs of warm-colored paint on it. Then wrap the whole circle with plastic wrap (covering the blobs of paint). Squish it around with your hands and fingers to make fiery suns! Then paste the suns onto dark paper and add flares and prominences if you want.

I think Teddy's sun (above) was my favorite.

We made our moon phase cookies again, using homemade "Oreos." These cookies are way better than real Oreos, in my opinion. The recipe is at the link above.

We had done these before during our Solar System Unit.

Another good thing we did during our mini-unit was make these eclipse T-shirts! (This picture was taken at Bear World in Rexburg, where we watched the eclipse.) I think they're so cute, and they were so easy! I cut out contact-paper circles (smaller for the smaller shirts and bigger for the bigger—I used bowls or plates to trace around) and stuck them onto the fronts of the black T-shirts. Then, using glow-in-the-dark fabric paint, the kids painted lines and rays out from the contact-paper circles. You can use the paint squeeze-bottle itself, or help it along with a thin brush. We did both.

The clear glow-in-the-dark paint was quite pale, so we made it pretty thick so it would show up even when NOT glowing. And I like the whitish color of it. But Abe used yellow on his, and that looked good too, and a couple of the kids just put in yellow accents with their white paint. (The girls would have used pink and orange paint if I'd let them—that probably would have been cute too, but I wanted them to look accurate!:)) You really can't mess these up! After the paint dried, we just peeled off the contact paper, and were left with a nice neat circle of "moon," with the beautiful glowing corona of the sun radiating out around it. 

We wore these (of course) on eclipse day and other times on our trip, and lots of people noticed the kids' shirts and complimented them. And the shirts, my children tell me, really did glow during totality! 

Here's a better look at the shirt

Teddy's had yellow and white on it

This is a picture Seb drew of the eclipse after we got home.

I read that we would be able to see planets during the eclipse, and we did! You can see one of them (Jupiter?) in the picture above. It was so cool!

Well, I must admit that the BEST part of this unit was seeing totality, and nothing else can compare! But I think it would be a pretty fun unit even if you were just going to view a partial eclipse. Here is my Pinterest Board for this unit:

Sun and Eclipse Homeschool Unit

Maybe I'll be updating it in 7 years! :)

Moon Phase Cookies and "Moon Tennis"

We loved doing this! Even Malachi was pretty good at creating each phase of the moon on his cookie with frosting. We took great strides of improvement beyond the original idea by using cookies that are actually GOOD, though: my friend Beth's homemade oreos. We love these! I made everyone tell me which cookie showed which phase, and then they sandwiched each cookie together with its "match" (first quarter with last quarter, waxing gibbous with waning crescent, etc.) before eating them. Yum!

Here's the recipe:

Homemade Oreos

2 packages Devils Food cake mix
4 large eggs
1 1/2 c shortening

Mix all ingredients together. Roll into tiny balls, place on cookie sheet, and bake at 375 for 7-8 minutes. Make sandwich cookies by spreading one cookie with frosting (recipe below), then placing another cookie on top.

Frosting/filling:
1/8 c butter or margarine, softened
1 8-oz. package cream cheese, softened
1 1/2 t vanilla
2 c powdered sugar

Mix all ingredients until smooth.

Saw this idea of "moon tennis" online. It went along with our discussion of what gravity would actually feel like on the moon---the idea being that some things would be easier to do and others would be harder, and that our lack of familiarity with that amount of gravity would make everything just feel . . . weird. Everyone really loved this game but it was WILD. Luckily all the materials are lightweight because there was lots of accidental (we hope) bashing of heads and arms.

Sam and I and the older boys watched this documentary about the Apollo Moon Missions. It was SO interesting. It's composed mainly of interviews with the different astronauts, and it's just fascinating to hear them recount their impressions and experiences. Lots of small, interesting details that you would never really think to wonder about---like if Michael Collins (the astronaut who stayed in orbit while the other two walked on the moon) felt lonely while he waited for the others. ("I would have liked being lonelier! Mission Control was yapping in my ear the whole time!") We loved it.

Playing Astronaut

Re-entry parachute check

One of my favorite things to watch is the way the children play whatever we are currently learning about. Of course, these Solar System weeks were FULL of astronaut and space play. I love this astronaut kit Abraham made for Malachi. Note the "launch hole" (!!) he climbs inside of to launch from (this is to protect bystanders from being burned by his rocket boosters firing!)

Ready for launch (wearing jetpack)

Take-off!

Seb dressed in his astronaut gear

Junie doesn't want to be left out

Daisy with rocket and launch tower she built from blocks