Space Activities in Nursery

Some of the children have shown a real interest in space and we decided to follow these interests and spend some time exploring this theme.

We used old bottles, packets, tubes and boxes to make rockets. The children tried lots of new ways to work on models joining pieces together using tape, glue sticks and wet glue as well as cutting pieces to change their shape or size.

When the models were finished they chose different colours to paint their rockets.

As a school we are celebrating our 50th anniversary and we wanted the corridors to reflect the events of the past 50 years. Knowing how interested the children were in space I asked if we could be involved in the display area covering the 1960s so we could link our space activities to the 1969 moon landing.

If our display was going to feature rockets on their way to the moon it seemed fairly important that we also have a moon to land on! Mr Webb helped us by cutting out a piece of MDF which we used to make our moon. The children used rolled up newspaper and masking tape to make craters on the moon. Rolling the paper was tricky but they soon got the hang of it.


Once the paper craters were stuck on the moon we covered it all in Mod Roc. Tia said "They are like bandages for when you hurt your finger!" We dipped the plater infused bandages in water and spread them on covering the surface of our moon. Finally we added white and grey paint to the moon surface.



In the garden the children enjoyed chalking rockets onto the pavement. Some of them lay down and asked Miss Marven to "draw a space suit on them" We took photos of this and printed them out on the colour copier to make astronauts on our moon.

Nicole and Charlie spent a long time making aliens out of some construction pieces. "These aliens live on the moon" said Nicole. Other children came to join them and soon we had a whole herd of aliens (I'm not really sure what you call a group of aliens!!)

The children had been using their imagination to come up with lots of interesting ideas but we thought it would be really exciting to watch footage of a rocket launch. Logan noticed that "the numbers go counting backwards" and we all joined in with 5, 4, 3, 2, 1, 0!

When we watched the footage of a space walk Tiffany laughed and said "They are bouncing!" In our role play children enjoyed dressing up ni the astronaut costume and bouncing around.

For our messy play we enjoyed lots of different activities including slime and glimmer sand. The slime had a really interesting texture, Alfie said it felt "cold and sticky and like a banana."

Using the shapes we were able to make rocket pictures by placing the shapes in different arrangements, Ruby added the moon and said "The moon is a yellow circle"

Our display looks really exciting. Last week some visitors came to look round our school and lots of them commented on how interesting and exciting the displays were. We are very proud of our space display as it shows people some of the fun things we do in Nursery.