Preschool~ Solar System

~Smiley is currently 37 months old~

SOLAR SYSTEM-PART II

I had planned on introducing our new topic this week; however, Carisa introduced this fun solar system preschool pack last week and it just fit so perfectly into our lessons that I just had to incorporate it. So, we decided to extend our solar system unit for an additional week. I am glad I did, because Smiley had so much fun with this preschool pack.

Here are some of the things from the solar system preschool pack that we covered. (I didn't take pictures of everything).

Smiley cut out the different objects and then sorted them by planets/non planets. He loved this!

We learned new vocabulary...

And we sorted the different planets based on their distance from the sun....

Learning Toys...

We worked with several different learning toys, such as this little animal puzzle...

and beads...

Valentines Day...
In honor of Valentines Day we worked on different pink art projects...

And we did a lot of different activities with hearts :)

 Sorting by size and colors...

 Making patterns...

Preschool ~ Solar System

Preschool ~ Solar System

This is our first official preschool unit. Now that Smiley is 3 and we have started to do more theme/project-based learning, I decided to link up to preschool corner to see what other preschoolers are up to :)

Over the past couple of weeks, Smiley has learned about the Solar System. He has asked me so many questions about the moon, sun and planets that I decided it was time to cover the topic a bit more in depth.

We made a collage on his bedroom wall with the sun and the eight planets. I found the images through google images, printed them on card stock, and used poster tags to attach them to dark blue colored paper. I wrote the name of the planets underneath. We learned the names and a couple important facts about each planet. Smiley learned the information very quickly and has been extremely enthusiastic about this theme. I guess it's a good thing that I followed his lead in choosing a topic :)

We have been reading lots of books about the solar system, including:
- There's no place like Space (The Cat in the Hat's Learning Library)
- Our Home Planet Earth by Nancy Loewen
- Stories of the Sun: The Planets by Clint Twist
- The Sun by Ron Miller

We explored several space related sites on the internet. Some of our favorites are: Kids Astronomy and NASA Kids.

We also took a field trip to the Kids Discovery Center. Lots of fun!

Math Skills:
We worked on different patterns with our little magnets. After a while, Smiley turned the patterns into a race track. The boy loves anything car-related :)

 We did different activities with our animal critters. We sorted them by size and shape and made different patterns with them.

We have been working a lot with puzzles lately. He put this puzzle together in no time. I am impressed how much his puzzle skills have improved lately.