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Wednesday, August 3, 2011

If I Was A Constellation


There’s something fascinating about the night sky. To help my son see more than just a sky full of “twinkle, twinkle little stars,” I checked out some great books on stars from our local library. First, we read Star Climbing, a fiction book by Lou Fancher. This dreamy book talks about a child who falls asleep imagining what it’s like to play among some of the most popular constellations.

When done, I opened Jessica Dowling’s Glow-in-the-Dark Constellations book to the page showing late summer star formations like Hercules, the Little Dipper, and Cygnus the Swan. We headed into a window-less room to see just what exactly these stars would look like in our night sky.

Finally, I handed my son a full-page photo that I’d snapped of him sprawled out on the floor the day before. I gave him another piece of plain white paper and told him it was time to turn himself into a constellation; he was intrigued.

Because we don’t have a light table, he put the plain paper atop the photo, paper clipped the two, and taped them to a window. Since the photo was printed on regular (i.e. thin) office paper, the sunlight shone through enough for him to make out his picture through the white paper covering it.


Like the constellations in Dowling’s book, he added star stickers to the main points on his body. Then we removed the tape and he used a ruler to draw a straight edge connecting the stars. The final result was awesome!


To wrap up our night sky-inspired activity, I gave my son a 100+ piece puzzle picturing constellations that glowed-in-the-dark. (I snagged this at Tuesday Morning for just $1.99!!) We love doing puzzles together!

6 comments:

  1. That is an awesome idea! We might have to do this when my son is older :)

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  2. This is SERIOUSLY one of the most ingenious ideas I have seen about constellations! Love it, love it, LOVE IT!!!!

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  3. I love this idea for constellations. I've had a constellation activity I've been meaning to do for a while, but this is much cooler.

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  4. Such a cool idea! Now I must take interesting photos of the girlies to start with.

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  5. I love this idea! I'm still working on the round-up for Week #6 but I plan on including this!

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  6. I really love this idea! JDaniel is so into stars right now.

    Please link this post to Read.Explore.Learn. on Friday.

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