Spray Paint Galaxies

 Our class loves spray bottles! We often fill them with water and take them into the playground. For this activity, I filled the bottles with watered-down white tempera paint. Then the children sprayed it onto black construction paper to make stars. 

 Of course the paint got everywhere! But we were expecting that and had lots of paper towels on hand. 

 Next, each child colored a rocket ship to add to their space scene. 

 Some of the children sprayed so much paint that it didn't look much like stars; but once the pictures dried they still looked like very cool space scenes.  

Solar Systems

 Today we talked about our solar system and the planets that it consists of. This video told us the names and sizes of the planets that orbit around our sun. After watching the video, we made our own solar systems. 

To begin, I cut contact paper into rectangles and peeled off the paper. I put each piece of contact paper on the table with the sticky side up and secured it with tape. 

 Since the sun is the center of the solar system, we put a bright yellow sun (that I had cut from construction paper) into our solar systems first. 

 Next we added planets that I had cut from different colored paper earlier in the day. I let the children decide the number of planets they wanted to add. 

 

After the planets were in place, the children shook sparkles all over their contact paper to represent the stars in the distance.  

 We put a piece of black paper over the back of the contact paper to finish. 

 Later I put blue painter's tape around the edges to make a frame. 

When we were all done making these, we had fun counting the number of planets in each solar system. 

Sparkly Stars

 Now that we have made rocket ships, we need stars for them to fly around. I cut stars out of blue and yellow construction paper and set them out on the table along with bowls of glue and the leftover sparkles from Christmas time. 

First, the children covered their stars with glue...

... lots of glue! (It took days to get it all off of the table.)

Next they added the sparkles.

When the stars were dry, we hung Christmas lights on the top of our castle to represent twinkling stars and used fishing line to hang our paper stars from the lights.