Stars and Moon

Today was the start of our theme “Stars and Moon”. We learnt about the sky in the night when it is all dark and if we are up, and not sleeping, we can see stars and the moon. We also learnt that the moon has no light of its own; it gets its light from the sun. If the earth is in between the sun and the moon, the moon cannot get any light. We looked at our globe of the earth and Shelley showed us how it turns around and around. So, in the day time we can see the sun shining down and from the blue sky is which can be white if there are lots of clouds, and it can

possibly be grey if it is stormy and rainy; in the night time the sky is black and we cannot see the sun. We can only see stars and the moon if there are no clouds. Space and our earth are really interesting topics to discuss and we are extremely curious about them both.

At the activity tables, we made a telescope because this is the equipment that you need to use, if you want to see the stars. Telescopes are really powerful because when you look through them, you can see soooooo far away, into the sky. With our telescopes we can also see stars and a moon. We made our telescopes out of toilet rolls. Each of us covered a toilet roll with origami paper. On one end of the toilet paper, we attached a piece of coloured cellophane with a rubber band. We pasted chose sparkles and glitter glue on to the cellophane. We looked for a moon shape and a star shape in among all of the sparkles so that we were

looking into space. We attached a piece of yarn to our telescopes to we could wear them around our necks just like professional sky watchers.

At the second activity table, we made the earth. We looked at a globe of the world and noticed that there was a lot of blue on it. When our teachers asked us what it was, most of us thought that it was water. It is actually the oceans of the world. The other colours on the globe represent the land and we found Japan, which is where we all live. In

order to make our own one dimensional globes, we first cut out a circle shape. Then we covered it with blue tissue paper and for the land masses, we used light green felt or tissue paper and pasted it on top of the blue. We hung ours on the balcony on the washing line which we use to hang up our art works that need to dry. When we looked outside we saw lots of earths hanging on the line.

We also learnt that the earth moves all the time except it moves so slowly, that we cannot feel it; otherwise we would be really dizzy, if it

went quickly. We also spoke about going to the moon and how we could get there. Luka told us that we can go in a rocket so we went to the computer and we watched a real rocket launching from the launch pad. Usually we count one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine and ten but we listened carefully to a man’s voice and we noticed that he was counting backwards. We counted backwards too and said ten, nine, eight, seven, six, five, four, three, two, one, zero….lift off. We saw that

there was a lot of fire around the side and at the back of the rocket as lifted off from the launch pad. We watched it speed off into space on its way to the moon. We will make a rocket in one of our activities this week using square shapes, triangular shapes, letters of the alphabet and some collage materials to make the fire at the back of the rocket. We will start tomorrow so you can see what kind of rockets we are making.

We enjoyed seeing our friend Koh chan in our class today! Love always Shelley, Hisami and Liezel