Our small world area was transformed into an alien landscape where stick puppet aliens were playing - with pants! We enjoyed pegging the pants up on the washing line - just like the aliens in the story. 

We painted colourful and patterned pants........

.......made our own washing lines by tracing over patterns on pants using felt tip pens, then cutting them out and sticking them onto washing lines we had drawn.

We pegged them up on the washing lines across our classroom!

We even ate pants!

We painted our pants (made of bread) with milk that had food colouring mixed in, we toasted our pants, then we ate our pants! Yummy! We thought it was so funny that we were talking about eating pants!

 

After all that work on pants we turned our attention to aliens. We talked about how no-one knows if aliens exist or what they might look like, so we could paint whatever we wanted. What a variety of different aliens we created!

We also made playdough aliens then added some collage features and of course completed them with a pair of pants!

 

In construction we used our imaginations and our joining skills to create these aliens from Knex, Popoids, Interstar and Sticklebricks. Great ideas Antelopes!

We took photos of our creations against a starry backdrop. Good photography skills!

Here we are saving aliens by untangling them from alien tentacles - well, laces really!

 

 

We were interested in the illustrations in all the space books we had found in our bookbox and were keen to find out what some of the pictures and photographs were of. We copied some of the illustrations and wrote the names of some of the planets and other space objects. We even wrote while laying on our backs - like astronauts do in space! We used lots of our ideas about space and aliens in our pen disco session which we did while we listened to space-themed music. 

 

Here we painted the view from the windows of our spaceship. It was fun standing up to paint and being able to see through the clingfilm to see our friends painting on the other side! We had to work as a team to share the paints and the clingfilm to paint on.

 

In the story the aliens had travelled to Earth in their spaceships. We used paper plates, felt tip pens and stickers to create these flying saucer spaceships and drew an alien inside. We then used our knowledge about the story for ideas to write a speech bubble about what the alien might say. 

 

We also became engineers when we designed rockets of our own using 2d and 3d shapes, wooden blocks, Magnetic Polydron and magnetic blocks.

Houston we are ready for lift off!

We created moon buggies from Mobilo and tested them down ramps outside. Our mini me blocks were the test drivers so we made sure they were securely attached to our buggies using masking tape, elastic bands or pipe cleaners.

We took photographs of our buggies on our small world area. We had painted the background scenes ourselves using splatter painting, inspired by the book about 'Look Up'. It was fun to do and makes a super space background for our photos!

 

 

In our maths sessions we were focusing on the number 9 and linked this to our space theme and fine motor activities at the start of each day. We used tweezers to put 9 sparkly planet pompoms into Numicon, used spoons to scoop up 9 shiny space rocks, made towers of 9 cubes while wearing space gloves just like a real astronaut, and fed 9 stars to alien tennis balls!

We also put 9 stars and the 9 objects in the solar system into 10s frames, panned for 9 moon rocks in trays of moon dust and practised forming the numeral 9 in trays of space dust. 

 

We subitised how many stars were on each card and found the matching numeral card and counted out the correct number of space objects to match the numbered plates. 

We are practised counting space objects and writing numeral labels for each dish.

 

Here we are helping an astronaut reach his spaceship. We put the Numberblock characters in order from 1 to 9 then counted forwards from 1 to 9 so he could climb up into the rocket then counted backwards from 9 as he blasted off into space!

9,8,7,6,5,4,3,2,1,BLAST OFF!

 

We pretended to be space scientists exploring alien slime.........

......and rocks from alien planets.

Here we experimented with mixing colours. We predicted what colour we thought would be made when we mixed two primary colours together by holding up a coloured spot. We then used a pipette to put some of each colour into another jar to mix them together and looked at the colour we had made. Sometimes we predicted the colour correctly, sometimes we were wrong and it made a different colour. 

 

Outside we made rockets from large construction, explored textures in an alien world tuff spot and pegged up numbered pants in the correct order. 

We also got fit for space travel at our astronaut training camp!

We had thought about what we might need to take with us into space and wrote lists which we put inside space backpacks we had made. We chose our backpack, coloured them in and cut them out, then cut and stuck on a space badge.

Now we were ready to go on a mission into space!

 

Our role play area was the perfect place to go! We dressed up in space clothes, put on our space gloves and helmets, and were off exploring space!