{Jupiter}

We received an email from school that the learning topic for the third week of January is the Solar System and that the Pre-K class will need to work on a diorama project. I absolutely love that the kid's school has a learning theme every week. It is across the whole school so kids from infants to kindergarten will learn about the topic at their own learning level. This past Monday, the school was decked out with lil planets hanging on the ceiling hallway and "moon rocks" rice krispies were served as snack one day. So fun!

William was assigned the planet Jupiter for his diorama. Of course, William having both Mom and Dad as engineers, was destined for "geekdom" with this project. We googled dioramas and most are complex. We wanted to make sure that William will have the opportunity to do most of the work for his project. We decided on assembling Jupiter and the 4 Galilean moons for his diorama.

We read the books the about planets for William to learn more fun facts about Jupiter.
He really enjoyed painting the round styrofoams. I love how he has absolutely inherited his Dad's attention to detail skills. He was intent on matching the colors of Jupiter. Putting glitters for the stars was so fun too! He did really well with spacing out the stars evenly.

Then we practiced our writing and spelling skills by having William write some of the fun facts about Jupiter.

We spelled out Jupiter and showed him how it is written. The curvy letters are a still bit of a challenge for him. He asked for some dots for the letter "J" to start with. The rest of the letters he was able to write on his own.

We picked out fun topics that will include words and concepts, such as "Red", the numbers "4" and "5" that he is familiar with. He wrote all the "Red" items all on his own. Funny how he remembers well that the the red circle is for the "Eye of Jupiter ". When we were learning the facts, we would point to our eyes and that simple association helped him remember this fact very well! For size visualization, Ed added the planet earth to William's diorama. William now has an idea of how much bigger planet Jupiter is in comparison to planet earth.

He had so much fun working on this project. Amazing how kids can absorb so much information when they are having fun! Ed put together the planets and the moons. He even made a make shift disk for the 4 Galilean moons so that they can spin around Jupiter. William was so happy when he saw the finished product. There was a lot of pride in him that he painted the planets, moons and stars.