Brownie Try-Its: Space

(click to download)

I have been going through my hard-drive trying to clean up my files and clear up some space when I came across some printables I made to go with my daugther's Brownie Space Try-Its patch. I had so much fun presenting to the troop. Here's what we did:

1. Made M&M constellations. I had a file folder for each girl in the troop. On the front of the file folder I glued a piece of black cardstock. When the girls arrived, they each received a small bag of M&M's, one sheet of foil stick-on stars and a white crayon. They had to pour a handful of M&M's in their hand and then drop them on the black cardstock. Wherever a M&M landed, they would place a foil star. Once they had all their stars down, they had to create their own constellation.

2. Next I read some constellation stories from Constellations: A Glow-in-the-Dark Guide to the Night Sky . I had this cool little light that made the glow-in-the-dark stickers really shine. I turned off all the lights in the room and read a few of the stories using that flashlight. It really helped the girls see what the constellations looked like and why they were named that way. Then we went outside and tried to find some of the constellations we read about.

3. The next two activities we did in stations. At one station the girls created Oreo cookie moon phases. Click here for directions: Oreo Cookie Moon Phases Hint: buy double the amount of cookies you will need for the project as half will get eaten! We adhered the cookies to the plate with white frosting. Yes, we had alot of sugar that evening!

I found that the younger girls needed to keep this activity simple, so we only focused on four of the phases instead of eight.

4. The second station we did was film cannister constellations. Click here for the print-out: Constellations. These were so much fun to use afterwards! The directions call for a large safety pin, but we found that using jumbo thumbtacks worked perfectly. Each girl made three constellations.
Here is what I included on the inside of the folders. As part of the Try-Its, each girl had to draw a picture and chart the moon for a month. I thought that by putting everything in a file-folder--kind of like a modified lapbook---that we would have a greater chance of the assignments coming back. Everything was adhered to the file folder for each girl to bring home.

Additional Space Resources:

Exploring Creation with Astronomy book & journal

Many Space Units/Lapbooks/Notebooking pages from Homeschool Share

Books: