Once Upon A Book: I Want to Be an Astronaut

I Want to Be an Astronaut by Byron Barton

Book Summary: Blast-off! Up into the sky goes the space shuttle. Into orbit, the astronauts get a taste of ready-to-eat food, experience zero gravity, go for space walks, and even fix a satellite. It's fun to fly aboard the shuttle...and then come back to earth.

 

Bible Verse

Psalm 148:3--Praise him, sun and moon; praise him, all you shining stars.

 

For our space adventure, we started with the Astronaut Preschool Pack from Homeschool Creations as the basis for our activities. Jonah loved the pre-writing skills practice. Once a struggle to get him to hold a marker and follow the lines, he did this activity over and over now that he's feeling confident with it.

 

Jonah also really enjoyed the shadow matching activity in the Astronaut Preschool Pack from Homeschool Creations.

 

Math

I had some star cutouts left over from my teaching days that I numbered 1-10. Jonah used the 1-10 number line (from the Dollar Tree) to help him place the numbers in order. We also used these to count objects.

 

Countdown Practice

We practiced counting forward and backward. For the countdown from 10, we placed our hands together above our heads and pretended do be in a rocketship. We bent our knees as we counted down until we were in a squatting position. When we reached zero, we yelled "Blast off!" and shot our "rocket bodies" into the air.

Art

We made a simple shape rocket.

 

Music

We changed the words to "10 Little Indians" to "10 Little Stars"

 

1 Little, 2 Little, 3 Little Stars,

4 Little, 5 Little, 6 Little Stars,

7, Little, 8 Little, 9 Little Stars,

10 Little Stars in the Sky!

Review & Assessment

 

For a quick review we played a game of "Splat" on our magnetic erase board. To play "Splat", I gave Jonah a magnet to "Splat" the letters I asked him to find. Since we were reviewing A for Astronaut, I wrote several A's on the board and filled in the spaces with other letters. He then had to find all the A's and "Splat" them. Later, I changed the game depending on certain skills I wanted to review and assess--ABC order, letter sounds (I only wrote a few letters at a time), and even numbers. This game is so versatile!

 

 

A special shout-out to The Home Teacher for reminding me of this game I used to play in my kindergarten classroom!

 

Snack

Since astronauts eat their food in ready-made-packs, we had a Go-Gurt for snack and talked about our book.

Other Resources We Used

• A is for Astronaut  writing page from Spell Outloud
• Man on the Moon Unit from Musings of Me