Skip to main content

Scratched Constellation Designs




I taught my constellation activity today. It didn't go as well as I hoped (Monday???). One class didn't finish. The other class did with lots of complaining (about coloring)!

I took an idea I found on the internet (see this site) and modified it for the class. I initially wanted to use the cards and hole punch like the website but my hole punches wouldn't reach far enough in. I saw this idea on the web and thought of using it as well but couldn't find any jumbo push pins.

I remembered an old Girl Scout craft where you colored one color underneath a darker color (crayons) and scratched out a design and thought that would work.

The students really had to color hard with both colors - yellow on the bottom and blue on top (hence the complaining). It did not work well with generic crayons (Crayola worked best). Time wise it took about 20 minutes for the entire class to finish. We scratched out the constellations using paper clips.

The right hand side of the notebook held the lyrics to a constellation song on YouTube. You can download the lyrics HERE. (The kids loved the song. We listened to it and sang it about five times). The left hand side held the finished scratched constellations.


Labels:

Comments

kinderpond said…
This is awesome! We will be doing constellations later and plan on doing this!


Jennifer
September 19, 2011 at 10:13 PM
Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Digital Citizen Cards

This project idea came from a monthly challenge put out by Adobe Express. We have the free EDU version deployed in our district and I thought this might be fun to try with a class. I liked that there was a prize element where the students could win a classroom set of hero cards  and it tied in with Digital Citizenship Week (October 17-21).  I teamed up with an elementary technology lab teacher and we decided to try it with one fifth grade class.  We looked over the available templates and decided we liked the layout of the 6-8 template the best (because they had to list advice for staying safe online).  One of the best things about these Adobe monthly challenge templates is that they can be modified. The revised template can then be sent to students via a link or through Google Classroom.  All the templates for this challenge Adobe gives you a sample template with sample wording but we wanted students to come up with their own wording. Neither one of us was ke...
Post a Comment
Read more

Picture of the Day - Activity

I attended a training class and a science coach shared an activity that he does with his students to help them differentiate between observations, inferences, and predictions. He puts a picture on the interactive white board as a warm up (he gets the pictures from a variety of sources but uses National Geographic's Picture of the Day a lot). The picture above is from the National Geographic site. He has the students make five observations. Then he makes the students make five inferences. Finally he has the students make five predictions. He does this every day and it really drives home the difference between those three key inquiry vocabulary terms. I've done this activity with both my sixth and fourth grade science classes and the students really got into it and became proficient at telling me the difference between those terms.
13 comments
Read more

Weathering, Erosion, and Deposition Activity

I saw this activity at a science conference years ago and haven't had a chance to use it in a classroom until this week (mainly because I didn't teach weathering, erosion, and deposition). It is a great way to reinforce the definition of the weathering, erosion, and deposition in a highly kinesthetic manner. Basically you break the students up into groups of three. One group is "Weathering" another group is "Erosion" and the third group is "Deposition". Add tape to the back because you are going to stick them to the forehead of the children in each group. The "weathering" students get a sheet of paper that is their "rock" they will be breaking down. At the start of the activity the "weathering" students will start ripping tiny pieces of their "rock" and handing it to the "erosion" students. The "erosion" students will be running their tiny piece of "rock...
5 comments
Read more