Planets

Song/Poem

"The Family of the Sun"
Added 9/22/98 Original Author Unknown
Sung to: "Farmer in the Dell"

The family of the Sun,
The family of the Sun,
Here are nine planets in
the family of the Sun.

Mercury is hot,
And Mercury is small.
Mercury has no atmosphere;
It's just a rocky ball.

Venus has thick clouds
That hide what is below.
The air is foul; the ground is hot.
It rotates very slow.

We love the Earth our home,
Its oceans and its trees.
We eat its food; we breathe its air,
So no pollution, please.

Mars is very red.
It's also dry and cold.
Some day you might visit Mars
If you are really bold.

Great Jupiter is big.
We've studied it a lot.
We found that it has lots of moons,
And a big, red spot.

Saturn has great rings.
We wondered what they were.
Now we know they're icy rocks
Which we saw as a blur.

Uranus is far.
It's cold and greenish-blue.
We found it rotates sideways,
And it has a lot of moons.

Neptune has a spot;
A stormy patch of blue.
The planet has a lot of clouds
And rings around it, too.

Pluto's last in line
It's farthest from the Sun.
It's small and cold and icy, too;
To land there won't be fun.
http://www.preschooleducation.com/sspace.shtml

What we did

-Read a space book and put together a space mobile.

Playdough Planets



After memorizing the song we divided the planets up and the kids made playdough planets according to the descriptions from the song.

Planetarium

Mars


Man on the Moon



Saturn




We took a visit to the Planetarium. We watched a movie about kids in a cardboard rocket who traveled through space. They visited the sun and all nine planets. It was fun to have the kids already know a little about the planets before going.

We Learned

Livi- I went to see the Planetarium. I had so much fun. I saw a movie. I learned so much about space. I learned that Jupiter is a big storm. The red spot is the biggest storm on the planet. Jupiter is made out of gas. Mercury is the closest to the sun. Mercury is really small. It has no atmosphere, it's just a rocky ball. Saturn and Neptune both have rings made out of icy rocks. Neptune you can't see that well when you're in space. Saturn you can see really well. When you go inside the rings you have to careful because they're made of icy rocks. Pluto is now not a planet, it's just a big rock. Neptune also has some beautiful blue. Mars is red, they call it the red planet. Earth is the only safe planet to go on without a space suit.

Ezra- The planetarium is fun and we saw Pluto and we got to look through telescopes and saw Saturn. We saw the rings and the whole little planet. That telescope was so cool. And the planetarium had a space man, Mars that you can go in, and the moon which you can go in. In the planetarium was so cool that we wanted to see more, but there was no more. We saw lots of fun things. There were rings and space mans. We had to park our car really far away from and we had to walk and walk and walk so so so much that Livi keeped saying can we go through that door? can we go through that door? and Mom keeped saying "no" until we got to the right door. Then we saw the Planetarium. This guy had to sign our paper to go watch the movie. We learned about the imaginations that we can imagine being in space. We can imagination the planets, Pluto, the two ringy ones, Mercury, Venus, and Earth which we live on and love the Earth. We like our Earth. The planetarium was so much fun that we took pictures. We couldn't take pictures during the movie, but we could after.