Theme: Planets

Hey, you didn't really think I'd keep up a weekly blog for that long, did you?  It feels like we did planets weeks ago now, and I actually started writing this back then too, but then I needed a few more photos, and then things got busy, and then... I'm finally finishing it now.  We've had a few weeks off from themes due to a couple of long weekends away.  But now all the playgroups are almost finished for the summer, I may blow the dust off my planning notebook and get motivated again. Anyway, to finish what we started:  Planets.

Unfortunately we didn't quite manage a field trip to see the planets!  But we did have a lot of fun painting them.  They seemed like they would be good candidates for rolling ball painting, so we gave it a try and it worked really well.

First you need some small balls.  I purchased a bag of marbles, which were just the right size to drop into our little pots of paint.  Obviously if your kid is given to swallowing small things or hurling them across the room, I would recommend you try ping-pong balls instead.

Pick your paint, drop in the balls, swish them around and fish them out with a spoon.  Put the piece of paper to be painted in a shallow tray, and plop in the painty marbles.

Then comes the fun bit.  Roll 'em, roll 'em, roll 'em!  Most times we just used two or three marbles, but a couple times Toby decided more was merrier (and made a better sound in the metal baking tray) and put the whole lot in.

I thought Jupiter came out really well, with the perfect stripy effect, but they all looked good.  We had a book for reference to pick out the colours, and then we lined them all up on the wall.

In order from the sun (not at all to scale!)

Jupiter.  I thought this came out best, with a great mix of colours and just the right amount of paint.

Uranus.  You can really see the marble tracks in the paint.

Saturn.  We put the painty marbles directly on the planet for this one, which gives a more splodgy effect. (I don't know why Blogger's decided to put it this way round)

Earth.  The Blue Planet.

Derby Museum runs a free Under-Fives Friday every week during term-time, with a few craft activities to try.  This week they had a sun and moon theme, so we went along and created our very own sun-on-a-stick out of tissue paper and a polystyrene ball.

It was supposed to have glitter on, too, but Toby's concentration ran out.