Towards the end of the school year, we did an Outer Space theme in some of the preschool classrooms. With it being the end of the school year AND testing week for the classroom teachers, it was a crazy week so I opted for activities that kept it simple!
With my speech kids, we made aliens with paper plates and target words printed on green paper.
I used pictures from my Cariboo phonology set, as well as from Primary Punch’s No-Prep Apraxia set, so that I had a variety of pictures for all of my artic, phono, and apraxic kiddos! I printed these on green printer paper to make the base of the alien face.
If you have a die-cut machine at your school/clinic, making the eyeballs are super easy, too!
Our space-themed sensory bin was a huge hit, too! (You can find the free printables here)
It was great for my articulation/phono kids working on blends, using words like star, space, sky, fly, planet, gravity, and blast, but was also really engaging for my language kids, too! We talked in simple terms about what gravity is/does, how planets rotate around the sun, what was special about certain planets (like the rings of Saturn), where/when you see the moon and stars, how astronauts get to outer space, etc…
My favorite conversation all week went like this:
Me: How do you know so much about outer space?!
5 year old: Because I’ve been to outer space!
Me: Oh yeah? How did you get there?!
5 year old: With a rocket ship
Me: (laughing) Where did you get a rocket ship?!
5 year old: From the rocket store
..I mean, I feel like that’s a pretty legitimate answer for his story đ
As much as I loved the sensory bin, though, the alien sensory bags were my FAVORITE!
I was fortunate in that one of my prek teachers had green hair gel in her cabinet, so we used that up first (by the way, Tina, I still owe you 4 or 5 bottles of hair gel!). Once we ran out of that, we used clear hair gel with a couple drops of green food coloring.
We sorted googly eyes by small/medium/large sizes, and also targeted following directions by having students pick a certain number of a certain size eye to put in their bag each turn (ie “Put 3 small eyes in the bag”). After their hair gel and eyes are in the bag, they can squish the hair gel to move the eyes around. Be sure to use duct tape or packing tape to seal off the opening of the bag when you’re done so nothing accidentally explodes in their backpacks!
What are some of your favorite things to do for outer space week?
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