Solar System Activities.

As a teacher, I always ended the school year with a Solar System theme! Many teachers begin the school year with this topic. As a homeschooling family, my son was interested in the Solar System all year long! Either way, whenever you decide to introduce it — there’s so much that can be done here! I know there are a TON of worksheets and printables you can grab online and those are great options!

Here are some tangible, concrete Montessori-inspired ideas if you’re looking to venture into Solar System activities.

How the planets orbit the sun:

This is a fun little activity to show how the planets orbit the sun! You need a yellow piece of paper (or yellow play-doh or even a piece of felt) that represents the Sun, a small blue ball or marble that represents the Earth and a pie plate that represents the orbit! Show your child how to hold and tilt the pie plate while keeping “Earth” in its orbit. It’s actually pretty tricky! This is great for fine motor skills, hand-eye coordination and patience! In our experience, they want to try again and again.

Here’s a shelf work that represents a similar concept. You need a ball (Sun), a pipe cleaner (orbit) and a ball with at least one hole in it (Earth on its axis.) With my 18 month old around, I couldn’t leave the pie plate and the marble work out and about so this worked well as a substitute. This material shows a planet rotating on its axis AND revolving around the Sun — at the same time!

Planet names and facts:

When introducing a new concept to a child it’s always a good idea to start with 3D objects; so something like this where a child can hold the planets and then label them is fun. You can buy these or DIY by getting all different sized styrofoam balls and painting them.

These 3-part cards are a great way to explore the solar system and the many names that come up. They are also free!

This is a beautiful material I scooped up from Lily and River. The kids had a lot of fun matching the planets and the facts together!

If you have a reader on your hands, they’ll love a DIY book like this with tons of facts and a small challenge on each page: deciding which planet belongs in the blank space.

This is a fun little puzzle that shows the order of the planets from the Sun and we also have this floor puzzle, too. If you’re not sure the order of the planets, we sing “The Planets Revolve Around the Sun” (tune of When Johnny Comes Marching Home) and we sing it all the time.

The planets revolve around the sun, hooray, hooray.

The planets revolve around the sun, And spin on their axes, every one.

And they all go spinning, Around and around they go!

Mercury, Venus, Earth, and Mars, hooray, hooray.

Mercury, Venus, Earth, and Mars,

All whirling and twirling among the stars.

And they all go spinning, Around and around they go!

Jupiter and Saturn are next in line, hooray, hooray.

Jupiter and Saturn are next in line,

Uranus and Neptune also align.

And they all go spinning, Around and around they go!

Astronauts:

Small figurines are always fun for young children to explore. These ones are similar to what we have. We pair them with real images and postcards.

This parts of an astronaut puzzle pairs nicely with the free printable found here.

Constellations:

This is a fun DIY about constellations. It took a black piece of foam board, tracing the constellation we chose, poking out the holes and then using a battery-operated pack of twinkle lights to light up the constellation.

We also explored constellations with two projects from Green Kid Crafts. The first one was to make a small planetarium out of a cardboard tube and a small flashlight and the other was to make a constellation geoboard!

Solar System:

Here’s my DIY for these cosmic nesting boxe s which were such a hit (and easy to make!) We also made a 3D solar system model, too.

There are some really great lego kits that have a space theme, too. So I like to include those because they are really attractive (especially for my 5 year old) and they require sequencing, following directions, building and so on. They are also conversation starters.