Man on the Moon

Here are all the wonderful, fun and educational activities from our March activity box, inspired by the fantastic book Man on the Moon by Simon Bartram. These activities are perfect for sparking curiosity and questions about all things space. We hope you and your children have lots of fun blasting off into space with these activities at home!

Moon Small WOrld

Small world is always a hit with our little ones and is such a great way to help develop language and story telling. The girls were eager to get started and helped set up their own small world using the tissue paper and playdough. Then they carefully placed the chickpeas on their playdough to create the stars. This is great for developing fine motor skills. Then they took their astronauts and began acting out the story. We used our vocabulary card to remind us of all the things that Bob got up to on the moon. He went summersaulting as the tourists rockets zoomed over the moon!

Moon Phases

This is a lovely art activity from our March subscription box where your little ones will create their own wall hangings whilst learning about the different moon phases. Our children loved experimenting with the chalk. Exploring the idea of smudging and creating different shades with just a simple piece of white chalk. Both mine were incredibly proud of what they created especially the moon like texture effect that they were able to achieve.

Lava LAMP

This activity is definitely one that intrigued, fascinated and raised lots of questions with our little ones! You will need some oil and a jar or bottle of some sort. Everything else you need is included in the March subscription box. We spent a lot of time looking at how the water and oil reacted with each other. And discussing why they were not mixing. We made predictions at each stage of the experiment as to what would happen next. Making predictions is an important scientific skill to learn and can be done with young and old children too. It was fun to predict what would happen when we dripped the food colouring in after watching what had happened to the oil. Since this experiment ours have been keen to try different experiments!

Star Constellations in Playdough

Using the silver chickpeas, the playdough and the star constellations cards we created the different constellations. My son thought that it was hilarious as he made up his own star constellations but arranging the silver chickpeas into different patterns and shapes.

Star Constellations

This space themed activity needs a little a trial and error to get the effect just right. It took us a while to work out exactly how close to hold the card to the wall and where the torch needed to be too. We found it was better to hold the card closer to the wall and then the torch a little further away. This activity has inspired lots of star gazing with our little ones. And they were absolutely overjoyed when we spotted the big dipper in the sky outside!

Counting stars

I have often looked longingly at beautiful wooden number boards but have always resisted buying because of the cost. Therefore I made my own using an old box. It was really quick and simple and enabled my son to practice counting out bigger numbers. I have kept the number cards safe and when we have 10 minutes to fill I will often get these and stars out for some fun counting practice.

Whack a Phonics Planet

For this activity I used the blue playdough from our March Man on the Moon box. I drew three big planets on some cardboard and wrote a letter sound on each. I then drew smaller planets with the same letter sounds on and covered them in playdough. I added objects which started with each letter sound to the big planets.

My son then had to whack the playdough to find which letter sound was underneath, say the letter sound and then sort it into the correct pile.

Sewing Constellations

My two have really been enjoying sewing recently and have found it a calming activity at home that we can all sit down to do together. Sewing is great for fine motor skills development as well as helping with perseverance. It is at times frustrating and tricky but if you keep going there is a great sense of achievement. F did need a little more help to work out which way to thread next and although hers wasn’t perfect she was still very proud of it! We wrapped a little washi tape around the end of the string to make it easier to thread.