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This is a project that you can gear towards 3-7 year olds. The older they are the more detailed you can get. My son loves space and planets and asks LOTS of questions about it!! We recently took a trip to the Museum of Natural History in NY (which is amazing by the way!). We go every year and one of his favorite things to do is when we go in the planatarium! They have an incredible show there called “Cosmic Collisions” it talks about how sometimes Collisions in the universe can help to something good and shows how our moon was formed in one month!! Can you believe that one month!! There is so much information that they tell you during this amazing show. But anyway, I digress!! Since we had gone recently and my son loves it, and they are studying it in Kindergarten, we decided to read up a little more on space and planets. The Planets in our Solar System tells a lot of great information in terms a 6 year old can understand. Then we created a planet. My son had the choice of either creating his own planet and figuring out things about it, or making an actual planet. As you might have guessed he created his own planet!! He has quite an imagination, so I am not sure I could tell you all about it, but the basics were that there were living things on it like fish, it has 2 moons and there were meteors in the sky. It also had water on it (although I guess that is obvious since there are fish, LOL). The idea is to tell them things about a planet that they should know and let them make it up.
Here are some questions to think about before creating the planet:
- Can life exist there?
- How far from the sun is it?
- Is it cold? hot?
- How can you get there?
- What does it look like?
- Is there water?
- Does it have a moon (s)?
- What is the Planets name?
Supplies:
- Large Styrofoam ball
- Wooden Dowels
- Pipecleaners
- Markers
- Flat Styrofoam piece
- Smaller Styrofoam balls
- Toothpicks
Steps: (this really depends on how your child imagines the planet to look)
- Draw on Styrofoam ball with marker, make water and what ever else you like on it
- Use Pipe cleaners to make rings or whatever your child has in mind!
- Attach Moon (if there is one ) with Toothpicks and attach smaller styrofoam balls as moons
- Put Wooden Dowels in bottom of planet-push in a bit to make it sturdy-I used three
- Put other end of dowels into flat piece of styrofoam
Now you have your very own planet- My son’s is called Timer!
