My kids have never been interested in Space until a few weeks ago when they watched this You-Tube clip  Space shuttle launch .   Now my little boy is obsessed.  He walks around the house doing a countdown and they saying “we have lift off” and makes the sound of the space shuttle taking off.

So after being house bound (sick daughter) I decided we should take the space obsession a bit further and we made a space play box/ sensory box for him.  I started off by covering an old amazon box with some kitchen foil and then filled it with some black beans,  some silver glitter balls, our space play dough and the Space Safari Toob wich I recently bought from Amazon.  Pink actually went and fetched the egg carton from her art trolley (have I mentioned lately how much I am loving the art trolley – it really encourages the kids to be creative) and added that herself.

The kids love it.  And I have to admit it has been a nice change from the normal cars and trucks in our house.

The space play dough is home-made using the no-cook play dough recipe from Imagination Tree.  It really is very quick and easy.  I added blue food colouring to my mixture and some silver glitter and it ended up with a great Bluey/ gray colour.  We will definitely be using this recipe again.

Naturally I could not resist doing a space picture with the kids.  We used some sponges and painted an A3 size paper with blue / black and dark purple to get a night sky effect, while the paint was still wet we added some silver glitter for the stars and we left the paper to dry over night.  I made the kids some rocket shapes, I made them slightly different as I wanted to ensure that Blue did not get too frustrated with his but I also wanted Pink to think about how her shapes would make up the space shuttle.  Pink cut her shapes and I number a few of them in 10’s.

I helped Blue with his cutting  and I included outlines on his template so he knew where to stick his shapes.

Blues finished picture

And Pink’s finished picture

So next on our list –  to make our very own space rockets, we have made a few already but none manage to last very long with my boy.  And Pink wants to make some planets.

I am loving the weekly link-up of Home Ed related posts at Adventures in Homeschool, even if you do not Home Ed there are posts with great ideas of things to your kids after school, it is worth popping over and checking out.