A fun way to teach the phases of the moon!

      This week at school has been a busy one. I know what you are thinking, it's only Wednesday! I had a meeting all day yesterday, a field trip today, testing tomorrow, a study trip on Friday, and a "Celebration of Learning" workshop on Saturday. I keep asking myself how I will ever make it through this week. I am counting down the days until Spring Break (next Wednesday). Here's something we've been doing in our classroom! Enjoy!

    I want to share with you something that we did in our 5th grade classes this week that the kids REALLY enjoyed! Sorry, I meant to take pictures of the activity so you could see some real "footage", but completely forgot. Anyways, we are studying the Solar System and have just finished up our section on the phases of the moon. Compliments of my teaching partner, we had a fabulous hands on activity to go with it. (This was totally not my idea!)

   You will need four oreo cookies and a spoon for each student. The goal is that the kids have to use those four cookies to make the eight phases of the moon. We had our kids match theirs up to a place mat that looked very similar (not exactly) to this:

borrowed from http://www.sodhaibur.com

     Before the kids can eat their oreos, I went by and checked all of their work and had them make corrections.

     We used this as a concrete learning tool, but if you wanted to use it as an assessment you just would want to have a place mat without the moon phases written on them.

*Note: We did a ton of teaching, reading, and watching videos before we turned the kids loose with their cookies!

Here is a website that you can use to help support your teaching:
http://www.windows2universe.org

They enjoyed every minute of it!