Homelearning Attempt: Solar System

I love her handwriting :)

 
Thanks to The Magic Schoolbus (again), I am now starting a new topic which I totally did not plan for. This week we focused on the solar system, which is great because we're also concurrently doing stuff related to the letter "S".

To be honest, I was a little nervous because I'm not great with planets. But being a parent has taught me that however ungreat I am at whatever topic, it's still much more than what my child knows, and so I teach what I know, and as for the rest, we learn together :)

This was our blackboard for the week. Planets: not to scale, and colours are inaccurate because we only have a few bits of chalk!

The Planets Song on Youtube is a fantastic way for kids to learn the names of the planets. Don't scoff at the lyrics (it's really just repeating the names of the planets over and over) because for those who don't know the names and sequence of the planets, I guarantee you will by the end of the 1.19 minute song. I thought Poppy would brush it aside for being too kiddy but she quite enjoyed it. We listened to it a couple of times one afternoon, and the next morning, she was singing it happily.

Feeling encouraged by the excitement Poppy showed from that, I ventured further and we watched The Solar System Song. This is an excellent introduction to the planets.

It's from those songs that we moved to our first activity:

Poppy chose all the bottle caps to represent the respective planets, and I drew the orbits and she did the rest.

Then we sorted out stuff from our solar system into 'planets' and 'not planets' (thank you 1+1+1=1). Love how Poppy insisted everything had to be right-angle neat! And super love how neat our shelves look from this angle! Little sister also wanted to be part of the action. It looks like she's crashing in on our party but in all honesty, she was playing with the tray first - it's got a lovely reflective surface and she was admiring her smiles while we set up our activities :)

Yeah the tray: It's from Daiso, and because we stuck magnetic strips on the back of the little cut-outs, we didn't have anything flying around. 10 points to me for this ingenious idea! (and perhaps an additional 5 for the very neat looking bookcase in the background!)

 

I love this chalk effect. I remember doing it as a child with crayons. This was really simple but sometimes we don't really need complicated activities to teach or learn :) Poppy was so amazed with the effect and anything that gets a "WOW!" from my kid is a pat on the back for me

Orbiting plants! Got this cool idea from Busy Bee Crafts. Poppy enjoyed dotting the 'stars' most

Finally we ended off with a lapbook. As with all our past lapbooks, this one was kept simple as well, with each category (in this case, planet) having only 3 points at most. On hindsight, now I realise that we should have used pictures of real planets instead. But the set from the solar system printable pack at 1+1+1=1 depicted the planets in different sizes so I was sold. Most of the information was from KidsAstronomy and The Solar System Song from Youtube (Poppy was really enchanted by it!). By the way, the whole printable pack is great, but I'm keeping an eye on our home printer has shown frequent signs of PMS.

We really had fun learning about the solar system. I'm very happy to share that *I* learnt alot too!

PS Poppy says she wants to be an astronaut and go to the moon. Well at least now I can recite the names of the planets in sequence, so I won't embarrass her.

PPS I faced the whole "Pluto: to teach or not to teach" dilema. But the ever wise Max says not to, because it would be easier for Poppy in the future. So Pluto to her will remain as a yellow dog.