An Introduction to the Solar System
I should start off by saying, during my internship I did have not have any lesson plans for introducing the solar system. I am not very familiar with the Montessori lesson itself. I can remember seeing the materials out while passing through a room when an older child worked on it. With that said, this is as best as I remember the set up (more or less).
Because of the ongoing interest in the globe that we have been using in our room, I wanted to present a simple introduction to the solar system. And, now that my daughter's grandpa has a new telescope, I also felt it was the perfect time.
I purchased this solar system from Montessori 'N Such. It is meant to be used as a mobile but for now, we are using it this way. Using paper on a roll, I drew a sun and each planet to match the mobile planets. The cards are just for reference as I discussed how the planets would look if we were closer to them in a space shuttle. My daughter matches the planets to the drawings, where each planet sits in bottle lid so it doesn't roll off the paper. I spent a while looking for a Solar system song. I wanted something simple with only the names of the planets. I didn't find one so we sing this to the tune of Mary Had a Little Lamb:
Mercury, Venus Earth and Mars
With the stars, with the stars.
And there's Jupiter, Saturn too.
Uranus, Neptune, and Pluto.
The mobile came with glow in the dark stars , moon, and planets. We put some on my daughter's ceiling of her bedroom and used the rest to make this looking box.
She opens the box, shines the flashlight on the stars, closes it and peeks through the hole.
RECENT UPDATE ACTIVITY:
Now that we have been using the solar system models we have started to have some fun with them. Using the picture of the space shuttle, we start at earth. We have a count up (instead of a count down to practice counting) and when we get to 10 the shuttle is blasted off into space. While my daughter moves the card as if it is flying through the solar system, I am "mission control" and tell her what planet to visit. I add comments like "Mars, the red planet" or "it is too cold in Pluto, time to go to..." She also likes to pick where the shuttle will go and makes comments too. We always return to earth for landing when we are finished.