Moon Posters - or this Moon thing has to come to an end eventually...

As a sort of finale for our moon study, I gave each of the big kids a half sheet of poster board and asked them to make a poster about the moon.  Both of them focused on the phases of the moon.  I think you can tell which kid excels more in language arts!

Caleb's - given a white poster board he painted the whole thing BLACK!  I think his moon looks very realistic.

I did not ask them to include a fact card.  I commented to Caleb that his poster was a little limited on details and he added the note card with some facts from a book.  Annalise liked it so much, she added one too.

Annalise's

And so set our moon study.  I really enjoyed it and I think the best thing was how much it caused us all to marvel at the moon.  Even tonight I stepped outside for something and couldn't resist looking up for it.  It's a day past the first quarter and brilliant.  Go take a peek :)

Animals and The Moon

Wolves just seem to go hand in hand with a full moon.  However, when Caleb did a wolf report for his Little House class last fall, we learned that wolves do not howl at the moon.  They howl to find each other and it just looks cool seeing them silhouetted in the moonlight.

Many other animals do change their behavior based on the phase of the moon.  We did some online research and discovered that some animals become more active during full moons while others become more reclusive (predator vs. prey). 

Still we decided to use wolves as the focus of this craft.

Cut out a full moon.

Trace a wolf onto black paper to make a silhouette and cut it out.  (Cut out a piece to be the ground too.)

Layer it all together on dark blue paper and voila!

Moon Art

Although it looks like all we did was eat, we did have a few moon projects that were not food oriented!

One of my favorites:

I get a lot of art ideas from elementary school art teacher blogs.  I think that is where this one came from.

On a white sheet of paper, trace a plate for your moon.  Fill the circle with pieces of masking tape.  Don't go for uniformity, different sizes make this look more realistic.  Cut the circle out but allow a paper border around the moon - an inch or so is enough.  Using the same plate, trace a circle on a piece of black construction paper.  Cut that circle out and layer the two pieces together so that the masking tape moon fits in the hole.  Glue them together, add some paper stars and the tape the project to a sunny window and get a little moon glow in the daytime!

Mmmmmmoon Surface Cookies

This edible Moon project is probably better suited for older kids.  Not that littler kids won't enjoy it, but they won't get as much out of it or do as nice a job.

First prepare or purchase a batch of sugar cookie dough.  I made homemade dough, so I tinted it with a smidge of Wilton black food coloring to make it gray.  To make it round roll it up in parchment paper and slide it into a long glass.  Lay the glass on its side in the fridge and let the dough firm up for an hour or so.  Slice the dough into "moons".

Use toothpicks and a variety of sizes of straws to copy the moon's surface details from a picture. 

Bake...

These look green, but they were gray.  These are also sprinkled with sugar for fun.

A finished Moon cookie - I think they look pretty good :)

Unfortunately, we only like sugar cookies when they are hot, so many of these went to waste.

Mmmmmmoon Phase Cookies

How the moon goes through phases seemed to be the moon fact that the kids absorbed the most.  I think it is mostly because of the Moon Tickets, but this edible activity also helped reinforce it.

Oreos+Science:

She might have had a little help!

A mouthful of moon beams...

To do this you need pictures of the phases - we used library books - and chocolate sandwich cookies - we used Aldi knockoffs.  Open the cookies and scrape away the filling until the remaining filling looks like the phase you are trying to recreate.  We only did 5, but you could do the whole 28 days...

Mmmmmmoon Pudding

We spent Christmas in Miami this year - a first for me! We always have Christmas "Morning" in Miami before we leave for our trip, so it was like that only we didn't go anywhere. There are pictures, Rob took them with his phone. That will have to wait.

I addressed a few more Christmas cards...TODAY.  I'm not done, but it's Miami so I have until Three Kings Day to finish. 

OK I mentioned we had some tasty moon experiments...here is one.

This is pretty cool.

The moon has craters.  The craters are the result of large rocks hitting the moon, vaporizing, and leaving a bowl shaped dent (a.k.a. the crater).  I gave each of the kids a bowl of pudding and a small cup of M&Ms and bits of cereal.  Nuts would probably work for this too.  The M&Ms worked better than the cereal.  You hold the bits at different heights above the pudding and drop them.

Voila - pudding craters.

And then you eat it!

I would have preferred to used vanilla pudding for more realism, but I already had chocolate and that was fine with the kids!

The Moving Moon

With Annalise's World Book study coming to an end, I started looking for a subject we could study together. I had seen some cool Moon projects online and decided that we would set our sites on the Moon.

My intent was to use the moon across the spectrum of subjects and we were mostly successful.  We've read poems about the moon, written poems about the moon, read fiction and non fiction books about the moon, done moon crafts, observed the moon day and night, and this weekend will complete a full phase of the moon.

Our main project has been completing daily "moon tickets".  It has not been practical to view the moon every day or at least not during our school day, so we have been using the U.S. Naval Observatory's website to fill out most of the tickets.

The very first thing we did was read a poem about the moon. I could not find a kid's poem about the moon and many I did find were too long and complicated, so we read 4 lines of The Rime of the Ancient Mariner.

The moving moon went up the sky
And no where did abide;
Softly she was going up
And a star or two beside.

I did not think before about how the moving moon could be so moving as to inspire poetry, and it did make me think how moving it must have been to people who had no electric lights or telescopes.  The full moon especially is brilliantly bright and the surface is amazingly distinguishable when you compare it to other lights in the sky.

I wrote this haiku for the kids:

Phases

Bright round ball of light,

fading sliver in the sky,

now you've disappeared. 

They collectively wrote this one:

Moon

It's there, then it's gone.

It comes at night or in day,

like a bright flashlight.

I'll post more about our other moon related projects soon.  It has been very interesting...and sometimes very filling!