Solar System Study

My district reading curriculum is StoryTown. The 3rd grade series ends with two stories, one fiction and one nonfiction, about our solar system. It is a wonderful way to end of the school year. The students really get into learning more about space and each of the planets. Our writing for these two weeks is a research project over each planet. Students are placed in groups of two or three and assigned a planet to study.

Because it is the end of the school year and I will be moving classrooms, my bulletin boards are down. So we created a new bulletin board with the planets lined at the top and the inside of our space ship at the bottom. We filled the space with stars and comets as well.

 

Each planet group researched and organized their information into a poster to present (Speaking & Listening!) as well as an individual travel brochure. The brochures were written in a persuasive manner to entise people to visit each planet. The students got pretty creative with this, two of my favorite: Do you need a tan? Mercury is the planet for you! and Are thunderstorms your thing? Visit Neptune!

Space Backgrounds

The Readers' Theater we are reading this week is set in a spaceship exploring the solar system. Today, we worked on creating the backdrops for our readers' theaters.

Up in the Air! It's a... PLANET!

We have begun our study of our solar system and the students are loving learning facts about each planet. Our StoryTown lesson this week is focused on all 8 planets (sorry, Pluto!), so we are extending that nonfiction piece with some research.

The students were put in groups of two or three and drew a planet from a hat. I took Earth out of the running as we know so much about our planet already. The students filled out this information organizer as they read through their planet-specific books.

After discovering new and interesting facts about their assigned planets, they students worked on making a poster. I asked the student to imagine we all work for a solar system travel agency and they need to get visitors to come to their planet. They worked hard on creating advertisements to be displayed in the classroom.

We also made a 3-D version of our solar system, complete with asteroid belt! They had so much fun with all the research this week. I love how involved the students got in learning more about the solar system.