Perth, April 15 2020
Day 24 of #covid19 #socialdistance
Today we talked about the days of the week and the origin of their names related to extraterrestrial bodies. We didn't talk about how that is ultimately related to ancient mythology because my daughter is 3 years old and there was enough material already, but older children may appreciate some of these myths.
We started cutting name tags from a carton box, and wrote with different colours each day of the week, English one side and Italian the other side. Then, we counted them, it's a total of seven and we put a pink dot on those tags corresponding to days where my daughter usually goes to daycare.
Then, we made the extraterrestrial bodies - 1 star (sun), 5 planets (Mars, Mercury, Jupiter, Venus, Saturn) and 1 satellite (moon) - and coloured them in. We learnt the Moon has craters, Saturn has rings, Mars is rusted and that's why is red.
We made then tags for the extraterrestrial bodied as well, following the colour code of the week days. We then tried to match the day with its corresponding extraterrestrial body, and with that we realised both English and Italian are inconsistent: English has Monday, Saturday and Sunday that have a match; Italian has a match for working days (Lunedì Martedì, Mercoledì, Giovedì, Venerdì - that is Monday to Friday) and then it has other roots for Sabato and Domenica (Saturday and Sunday). BUT between the two languages we could find all the matches!
We also learnt a bit of the lunar phases, read rhymes about the Moon (in ITalian, those by Gianni Rodari; in English we went with Zoom Zoom Zoom we're going to the Moon), built rocket ships with building blocks and rescue cars in case someone gets in trouble while on a mission on the Moon.
We read this book in the picture, which also inspired some drawings. It's OK but not exceptional as it is at times inaccurate and misuses some technical terms. I think any children book about the solar system would be OK to associate to this activity.
Learning outcomes:
week days
writing/reading skills
match sounds
a bit of astronomy
Materials: carton boxes, colours, scissors
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