Space Themed Sensory & Pretend Play

After we completed our Making Moon Craters activity, I decided to keep rolling with the pretend play and turn it into more of a sensory experience. My son’s always been particular about tactile sensations, so I’m trying to provide him with frequent opportunities for sensory play.

 

It was nothing too fancy, but Dude played with it for quite awhile.

It basically consisted of:

A black piece of fabric

DIY moon sand & cake pan “Moon”

Rocks (asteroids)

Bouncy Balls (planets)

Some dollar store plastic and foam stars

Space TOOB (This has a great variety of figures, even a space monkey!)

 

I also put together a pretend Earth out of stuff we had on hand. The blue base is actually the boys old changing pad cover. (I liked the soft velvety texture of this.) I topped that with some green Easter grass and a plastic piece of “land” from another playset we have.

10, 9, 8, 7, 6, 5, 4, 3, 2, 1 ….Blastoff!

There was lots of blasting off, flying around other planets, exploring the moon, making craters, and even fixing the Hubble telescope.

I just love watching little imaginations at work!


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Making Moon Craters

Today we finally got around to doing the messiest portion of our space studies. It may have been a little messy, but it was definitely worth it! Dude had a ball making "moon craters" and learning about meteors, meteorites and the atmosphere.

We started out by making our own model moon. We did this by using a biscuit pan and filling it with homemade Moon Sand. There are recipes for moon sand all over the web, but we made ours by mixing:

3 cups of play sand

1 cup of cornstarch

and a little more than 1/3 cup of water

(I’d recommend mixing the dry ingredients in a big bowl first and then mixing in the water slowly until you get the desired consistency.)

We then collected some rocks and a marble to represent different types of meteorites.

And you guessed it!  We threw dropped the "meteorites" onto our moon’s surface.

(We placed our moon in the middle of a sheet on our kitchen floor to help contain the mess, which actually turned out to be pretty minimal)

Dude was ALL about this!

We then removed the meteorites and observed our craters. The moon sand held the crater shape wonderfully, but it was a little difficult for preschool fingers to remove the meteorites so I ended up helping with this part.

We also tried dropping the meteorites from greater heights and tried to predict how the craters might be affected.
I’m pretty sure the look on his face in this photo means “ I can’t believe you’re actually letting me do this!”

My son really LOVED this activity!

Some space facts that tie in with this project:

A meteorite is a rock, iron, and/or icy body that hits another body in space.

The Earth’s atmosphere causes most meteors that are headed our way to burn up before they can hit our planet.

The moon doesn’t have an atmosphere to protect it from meteors.

Because the moon doesn’t have an atmosphere there is also no wind on it’s surface, so craters and even astronauts footprints from 40 years ago are still there!

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Moon Craft Flop

Today we tried to make a cute moon craft that I saw over at I Heart Crafty Things. It really is a great idea….but unfortunately Mama messed it up.

The basic idea is to mix flour and white paint to make a textured medium to paint a moon. What I did, and shouldn’t have, was to also add water. Oops!

The process of painting the moon actually went well and Dude did really enjoy it. But when we tried to use a bottlecap to add “craters” it was obvious we’d done something wrong. Ours was just a sticky mess!

I tried to save the project by giving my son a rock to at least add some texture to his moon, and that sorta worked, but again Big.Sticky.Mess.

And as ours dries it continues to look more and more pathetic, complete with rippled, bunched up paper. Yeah, not showing you a picture of that.

But here’s how cute it could have looked if we’d done it right! Don’t you just love that texture? You can hop on over to I Heart Crafty Things for the full tutorial.

In the meantime I’ll just keep reminding myself that it’s process over product that’s really important anyway. And it was a fun process!

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