Pluto and the Kuiper Belt: Reading and Writing
The girls read the chapter on Pluto and the Kuiper Belt out between them in some excellent partnership reading:
They did lots of copywork:
Some vocabulary puzzles and a couple of mini books:
Filled in their own arguments for ‘Pluto: A Planet or Not?’:
Pluto and the Kuiper Belt: Model of the New Horizons Space
We made a model of ‘New Horizons’ the space craft which flew past Pluto picking up lots of new data and information on it:
This was very fiddly, so I did most of it. And the writing was so small on the instructions that I’m not sure every part was actually correct…
We taped it to a skewer in readiness for the next activity.
Pluto and the Kuiper Belt: Readers Theatre
I found a readers’ theatre play called Pluto is Peeved! We pulled apart one of the girls electronic models of the solar system and added our model of ‘New Horizons’ and a dinosaur and a petri dish filled with germs to create our own quick puppets to use with our puppet theatre:
Charlotte helped out one afternoon, and had her sisters well practiced before a performance to the rest of the family:
They did such a great job:
And of course Charlotte made it into a comedy, and kept us all giggling throughout:
Well done girlies!
Pluto and the Kuiper Belt: Mapping Pluto
I found the girls an interesting mapping activity. They had to look at fairly close up photos of Pluto of specific features taken by New Horizons and transfer what they see into labels onto a picture of Pluto:
This was quite tricky, but the girls enjoyed feeling like proper scientists whilst they were doing it!
This was a great week! The girls learnt lots and had heaps of fun in the process!
It may have been fiddly, but the model still looks super cool.