Show & Tell: MFW K—M-m Moon

Mmm-hmm.  Y'all thought I was kiddin', didn't you?  I know I've been bombarding you with posts this week, but that's the way it works when you're an inconsistent blogger.  :) 

Last Thursday, Millie finished her M-m Moon unit in kindergarten.  Here are some of the highlights.

We learned that the moon doesn't make its own light, but it reflects the light of the sun.

We learned that the moon is made of dust and rock and has no light of its own.  To demonstrate this, we wrapped a ball in aluminum foil and went inside my closet.  Seems to be the trend these days, huh?  Remember we did a project in my closet last week, too.  Which can only lead to one question ... does this make us closet homeschoolers?! 

This is what the ball looked like in the closet with the lights off.

It had no light of its own.

Then we shined a light on it and ... voila!

Our "moon," which we just saw didn't have any light of its own, suddenly reflected the light of our "sun."

This helped us to understand our special words for the week:

I am the light of the world.

Jesus is ultimately the light of the world (we learned that last week), but when He shines His light on us, other people are able to look at us and see His light.  As they see His light shining on us, they know He's really there.

We learned that the moon doesn't always look the same.

We read The Moon Seems to Change by Franklyn Branley and Papa, Please Get the Moon for Me by Eric Carle.

We discussed that, even though the moon seems to change shape, it's really always round.  It just looks like it gets smaller because, as it travels around the earth, we see less and less of its lighted-up side that faces the sun; then it looks like it gets bigger because we see more and more of its lighted-up side as it comes back.

We used chalk to color the phases of the moon on black construction paper and put them in order.

That was fun, but it was a lot more fun when we took Mrs. Yvette's suggestion and made them out of Oreos!

We learned that the moon is much smaller than the sun.

We shrunk the universe waaaaay down and saw that the moon is smaller than the earth and much, much smaller than the sun. 


In this model, the sun is a whopping 4'4", the earth (blue circle on the right) is a tiny 1/2", and the moon (white circle on the left) is a super-tiny 1/8".  Wowsers!

 So why do the sun and the moon look like they're the same size when we see them in the sky?  We went for a walk with our friends Elijah and Christopher to find out.  :)

If we really lived in a universe with a 4'4" sun, a 1/2" earth, and a 1/8" moon, the moon would be 14 inches away from the earth.  That's how far apart we glued them on our paper.  But the sun would be a staggering 461 feet away from the earth!  So we taped our sun to the mailbox and walked 461 feet with our earth and moon.  When we reached our destination and looked back, sure enough, the moon and the sun looked the same size!

See the sun waaaay back there in the distance?  It was kind of hard to see so I circled it in red and added a huge yellow arrow.

We also added to our Kindergarten caterpillar ...

... and we sang a sun and moon song to help remember how we measure days, months, and years.  (Sung to the tune of The Farmer in the Dell.)

The Earth spins around,

The Earth spins around,

Once a day, every day,

The Earth spins around.

The moon goes 'round the Earth,

The moon goes 'round the Earth,

Once a month, every month,

The moon goes 'round the Earth.

The Earth goes 'round the sun,

The Earth goes 'round the sun,

Once a year, every year,

The Earth goes 'round the sun.

And believe it or not, Millie actually got to practice handwriting in shaving cream last week!  Yes, this is my fourth year to homeschool, and we just did shaving cream handwriting for the first time!  She doesn't like to get messy, so I wasn't sure how much she would like it, but she loved it!



Another fun week of learning together!

Oh ... and just in case I'm not the only inconsistent blogger out there and someone else would like to award herself the Inconsistent Blogger Award, she should know that it's perfectly okay to grab it and display it proudly on her own blog!  ;)

Until next time ... and no telling when that'll be!  ;)