BB Part 4 - Solar System Posters

Hello, hello, and welcome to part 4 of my 10 part series, Blog Backlog: Playing Catch Up! I'm really enjoying getting to share some blog worthy things from the last month or two of school. Today I'm sharing a simple, yet easy, meaningful, and fun science activity.

My favorite science topic in 5th grade is SPACE! Here I am modeling wearing my planets t-shirt that I bought just for teaching this subject!

I was super lucky to be placed with an amazing intern this semester - she's going to be an awesome teacher soon - and she took the class outside to play with toilet paper. Well, actually, there was a scientific purpose. She had groups of students roll out the toiler paper and place a cut-out of each planet at their scaled distance from the sun. It really helped the kids get an idea how far the planets are from each other. 

Unfortunately, with all of the things that happen in our final quarter, sometimes there just isn't enough time to do as many in-depth activities in science that I would like. I needed a quick and meaningful way for my kiddos to get to know our Solar System. So, I came up with these simple Solar System Posters.

I had the students take a sheet of 17" x 22" copy paper and fold it in half lengthwise (hot dog style!) They opened it up and cut along the crease to create two long pieces of paper. They then glued these together with about an inch or two of overlap to make an even longer paper.

Next, we folded this to create 12 sections... so we folded it in half, then in thirds, then in half again. Then students labeled each section...
* Sun
* Mercury
* Venus
* Earth
* Mars
* Asteroid Belt
* Jupiter
* Saturn
* Uranus
* Neptune
* Pluto
* Our Solar System

Students used their science books to research each section of the solar system. As you can tell, the focus wasn't on just the planets, we included the sun, asteroid belt, and our dwarf planet friend Pluto! In each of the sections the students wrote at least three important facts about that part of the solar system and included a colored illustration. I absolutely loved their illustrations and they looked great hanging on the wall in our room.

I find that some of the best and most meaningful activities are projects where students get to complete their own research and use their own creativity. I hope you enjoyed part 4 of my 10 part series, part 5 will be up soon!

Design a Planet!

When I taught 5th grade years ago one of my team members created a wonderful set of task cards for students to imagine and design their own planets. This was a perfect creative writing and art activity to finish up our study of space and to keep students motivated and engaged at the end of the school year. These task cards were lovingly hand written by her and that year I typed them up (this was before I discovered pretty fonts and cute borders). Well, after that year I moved to 6th grade, leaving her behind in 5th. The 5th grade team continued to end the year with this project and when I returned to 5th grade last year I was excited for this project. I knew my kids would love it, and they did! I had one student in particular who, all year. struggled to stay focused and get assignments completed on-time. Once we started this project he was immersed and didn't want to stop. It was even an incentive for him to get some of those missing assignments in!

I allowed students to be as creative as they liked, but teachers could easily add more parameters to the project. We had a variety of planets inspired from things like Minecraft, school supplies, Justin Beiber, shapes, pets, and even a disco ball. Here is a last minute photo I snapped of their planets (this is only one component of the project) before sending them home.

I re-typed the task cards again this year and prettied them up a bit. With permission from my teammate I'm posting these on TpT for others to purchase. I've encouraged her to set up her own TpT store, but although she is tech savvy, she doesn't feel as confident as she should. I'm excited to split earnings with her because she did an amazing job coming up with these super tasks for students!

And don't forget to link up with your Pinterest Top 10 for Next School Year! The link party is up until the end of the month. Browse your pins and post about the cream of the crop, then link up here. Then check out the other posts for more awesome teacher blogger's pins!

Thank you to those that have already linked up, I've loved looking at (and re-pinning) your pins.