Sweet Smiles Preschool: Uranus...

On Wednesday we learned about Uranus! I asked the kids how long they think it would take to fly to Uranus. I had a number of responses, but most of the guesses were a number of "days." They were shocked to learn that it would take over 9 years to fly to Uranus!

I set out the planet cutouts and we sang...

"1 planet, 2 planets, 3 planets, 4

5 planets, 6 planets, 7 planets,

Uranus!

(Sung to the tune of "One Potato, Two Potato.")

The kids loved shouting "Uranus" at the end of this song!

We also learned that Uranus has 27 icy moons. I set out a tub of ice cubes. The kids noticed right away that our ice cubes look like a crescent moon!

Each child got together with one partner. I put a number of ice cubes in their bowl and asked them to figure out how many more they would need to get to 10. This was challenging, but I helped each group work through it. At the end, I asked them the same type of questions but showed the kids how to use their 10 fingers to find out the answer.

We learned that the Voyager 2 spacecraft (not manned) took almost nine and a half years to reach Uranus! Astronauts have never flown to Uranus because it would take too long. We talked about our friendship word for the month; "patient."

We discussed what it is like to travel long distances and what it must be like for an Astronaut. I challenged the kids to sit for as long as they could without moving. They lasted about 32 seconds and then they all starting giggling! :)

I placed our Earth cutout on one side of the room, and our Uranus on the other side of the room. I set the timer for one minute (this timer is a great visual for kids, and it beeps when the time has run out). I asked the kids to walk in slow motion from Earth to Uranus. The challenge was to not get to Uranus before the timer beeped. I was so surprised at how much they loved doing this. They kept asking to do it over and over again!

They started out slow, but got faster and faster when they got more and more excited. Some of the kids had it timed right by the fourth try! They had a lot of fun!

We were given new friendship bracelets that read, "I am patient" on them. Some of the kids don't care too much about these, but some of the kids really do love them. I see these bracelets being worn for days after our lesson sometimes!

Next I taped out 8 parallel lines on the floor and placed the planet cutouts on each line. We labeled the orbit lines with the numbers 1-8. We had a blast doing a number of activities on our orbit lines.

How many orbit lines tall are you???

How many orbit lines can you spread your feet apart?
(I saw this idea on A & Z Learning Adventure.)

Jump to the 7th planet! (7 is the number we are learning about and Uranus is the 7th planet!)

Can you hop on foot?

How far can you reach?

How far can you jump?

For our next activity, I explained to the kids that Astronomers think that a large object smashed into Uranus billions of years ago. This collision set the planet tumbling and eventually it settled into its tilt. Now it is said that Uranus spins on its side. We experimented spinning balls and tossing our alphabet balls at the spinning balls. We discussed what changes we saw happen to the spinning ball.

The kids in general just loved playing with the balls! We got A LOT of energy out!

Spinning the balls was a bit challenging for some of the kids, so we rolled the balls instead.

I asked the kids what they think would happen if they traveled to Uranus. They said they would see an alien, but I explained that Uranus is really a ball of ice and gas, so it doesn't really have a surface, If you tried to land on Uranus, you would just sink down through gases and into the icy, liquid center. I read our Mother Goose Time book titled, Up In Space again to the kids. This time I set out a story board and storytelling pieces. I added magnets to the back of each page so they could stick the pieces to our magnetic whiteboard. It was fun to listen to a few of the kids retell the story in their own way.

We worked on our number 7 page in our journal! We made 8 fingerprints on our page (one for each planet). Next we labeled our fingerprints with the numbers 1-8. We circled the 7th "planet" for Uranus. We completed the sentence, "Uranus is..."

"Uranus is blue."

We also practiced writing the names of our planets in our literacy workbooks...

Isn't he cute and studious?!

For our song today we listened to "Galaxy Groove" on our Mother Goose CD. During the slow tempo parts of the song we moved in slow motion, during the fast tempo parts we spun around like a planet...

We sorted planets by their color and by their size in our math workbooks...

These were our books for today. Captain Invisible was pretty cool!

After nap time we read this book together...

I have been LOVING all of these Thomas K. Adamson books! They are simple enough for preschoolers to understand the concepts. This book helped us to review why we only sometimes see a portion of the moon reflecting the sun's light...