Kids Wednesday: Learning about the Planets with fun books and activities

My son went on a school trip to the planetarium and came back wanting to learn everything about space so we went to the library and found the section on space books.  He picked out a few and I picked out a few.  I had to make a trip to another library to pick up more so we had tons of great books.

We got some that there stories like these about space and the stars.  It was nice to mix those with the more factual books.

Then there was a series of books that  just loves which are the True Books (those are the ones with the blue outlines around the outside mostly).  We picked out a book about most of the planets.  We went to the library to look for a few more planets that we were missing and we couldn't find them so we are going to put them on reserve.

Go with whatever is interesting to your kids right now and get everything you can on the subject to foster their love of reading and love of learning.  He is so excited to read these books and remembering tons of facts about all of the planets that he learned through his trip and reading these books.  I was stumped on what we were going to do as activities to go with these so I looked online.

I started with Teachers Pay Teachers to find some about the planets. One of my favorites for the young kids is the Planet Book.  It has a page for each of the planets and is a great place to start talking about the information and learning about each planet.  It can be set up starting with which ever planet you want and put together in whatever order you would like and only give them the sheets that you want to work on for that day so it is perfect to read one of the books about the planet and then fill out the page from the book.  Download your own here.

There is another Getting to Know the Planets which is a great resource because it has information, quiz and a great project to make the planets into a hat.  It is a great find with lots of great facts and knowledge.  If you would like to download it too, click here to find the file.

There are some cute posters that you could hang up when doing the planet activities and use them to put the planets in order to add different facts underneath.  They can be found here.  I don't normally use them but if my son is still into the planets then it might be fun to hang them in his room.  They are bright and colorful!!

There are a few coloring sheets for the different planets here.  There is a game for older kids which can be found here and adapted to younger kids here.  It is a huge file with lots of information so be prepared because it takes a few minutes to download.  It is a zipped file with power point so you can change any of the questions you need.  I found a matching activity where you match the color planets with the black and white ones here.  There is another great resource with cards that you can cut out with facts about each planet so you can match the facts and the planets or make posters here.  There is another sheet with the distance from the sun (be aware that it doesn't have the answer key so you need to figure it out before giving it to the kids) but check it out here.  Great questions with answer keys for lots of planet fun information here.

I hope that you can find some fun things to do with your kids while learning about space.  There is so much to learn and so many different topics you can cover while doing tons of learning starting at any age!!

Shared at Afterschool Link Up