I am a third grade teacher in North Carolina. I need some ideas on teaching the planets and incorporate some art in the unit also. I would appreciate any help. It must go with the new common core.
I teach third grade in New York City and we don't teach about the universe in this grade but we do teach world geography. Last year I had my students make their own globe out of balloons, newspaper, glue and water, and paint. It turned out really cute and the students had a lot of fun making them. It was quite messy, so I would have them bring in an old t-shirt. You can have the students make different planets in the solar system or they can each make their own mini solar system.
I had my kids be a tour guide of the universe. They had to take the "spectators" on the tour and give information about each planet. This was 5th grade, but I bet you could do something similar with 3rd?
There is an activity called Milk Planets in the book- Super Science Lab by Richard Hammond. I like that one a lot, and the students really enjoy it.
I am in West Virginia and I incorporated technology with our unit. We have 6 Tech Steps projects we have to do and I wanted to make it fun and something they would remember.
A few years ago I made paper mache planets using baloons, strips of newspaper, and flour/water mixture. It was a great investment in time....time consuming as far as making sure I preplanned everything out as much as possible and made groups. The groups painted them like their planets I assigned them to, and then we hung them diagonal from the ceiling for the kids to be able to remember the planets in order. We hung removeable labels from the planets in the beginning of the lessons, but I removed them when I gave them a test to see if they knew them in order closest to the sun and then out--and I included Pluto.
In 3rd Grade- Common Core doesn't say much with science content but these should all fit- I teach a few lessons on astronomy: - Scale Model of the Solar System - What causes the Phases of the Moon (we model this with little white Styrofoam balls on sticks and flashlights) - Solar and Lunar Eclipses (with modeling again) In 3rd grade you honestly do not even have to do that much with them to meet standards. Just a basic foundation that planets are far away, Sun: Earth ratios, and the moon changes. We teachers tend to over complicated things and think we have to teach a lot of difficult concepts in 3rd grade- we don't, we just need to set a foundation. (I took a week-long astronomy course at a near by community college this summer that was so helpful )
