A Spur of the Moment Space Unit : All the Resources You'll Need

I’ve written before about how I’ve found it best to use William’s interests to spark learning, so I thought I’d share about the spur of the moment space unit we’ve begun, just in case any of you have kiddos who suddenly want to learn all about the universe.

William is FINALLY off of his Titanic kick, which is great (it lasted a whole lot longer than I thought it would, and I’ll admit to being a little Titanic-ed out). Now we’ve moved onto space. Thankfully, this topic more naturally allows itself to be broadened.

After a lot of late-night Pinterest searching and some quick creating and tweaking, here’s what we are using for our Space Unit

Books We’re Using

We have a few space books, but here are our favorites:

This fabulous book is chock-full of facts and figures and is also illustrated by Steven Kellogg, who is one of my very favorite illustrators.

This is the atlas we have. We scored a used copy at a Church sale recently, and while it’s not completely up to date (read: it still refers to Pluto as a planet), it has glorious images and enough of the basics in words that my kids can understand. It’s just our speed.

I love the Magic School Bus books, and so do my kids. So of course, this one is a must for read alouds during a space unit.

Movies and Videos I’ve Found

Watching the NASA documentary on Amazon. Gram really loved re-watching the moon landing!

I’ve written before about how we are not opposed to screen time, and I am definitely not opposed to making screen time as educational as possible. And for me, if we’re going to read and talk and learn about things like the Apollo 11 moon landing, well, we might as well watch them too. We’ve watched episodes of the series NASA: A Journey Through Space on Amazon Prime, and have found footage of the moon landing itself on youtube as well.

We have also made sure to re-watch all the space episodes of the Magic School Bus on Netflix. For your convenience, they are listed below:

Original Magic School Bus

S1E1 Lost in Space
S2E11 Out of This World
S4E7 Sees Stars

Magic School Bus Rides Again

S1E9 Space Mission: Selfie
S2E6 Ready, Set, Fail
S2E13 Making Magic

Counting Activities

I love this simple moon rock counting activity from News With Naylors, and made a few tweaks to fit Will’s abilities and interests. Here’s how we used it:

I took 2 Bowls (white and silver, because hello, space) filled with foil balls of varying sizes. The first thing we did was count all the balls and transfer them from one ball to the other.

Then I let William throw all the balls willy nilly all over the kitchen (as opposed to into a bowl) because he is still mastering his throw and has no sense of aim or ability to judge strength yet. It was fun for him, and good throwing practice to boot.

Next he collected all the balls he could find, and we counted them again, to make sure that he had gotten them all (but also to sneakily give him more practice).

And repeat. As many times as he wanted. I’d add a few or take away a few at the beginning of each round to keep things interesting.

Pre-writing Activities

William is currently learning his sounds, and we are (slowly) working towards writing and reading. Two activities that he enjoys are practicing following lines with a marker and writing sounds in a sand tray, so I was glad to find these space-themed versions.