Pre-K: Gazillions of Galaxies

Ask your Pre-K child for a word that starts with "Gg", and you are likely to get anything from “green” to “German Shepherd” to “goggles” to “Gracie”! This week, we’ve decided to focus our newsletter on our exploration of galaxies, since we followed the children’s interests and let it expand from math and science into our language and art areas as well.

We used our galaxy exploration to read both some poetry and some nonfiction this week after we distinguished between fiction (pretend) and nonfiction (facts). Children eagerly completed the rhymes in the book of poems Comets, Stars, the Moon and Mars and made predictions about facts relating to the universe while we read Galaxies and the Universe. Here are a few of the things Pre-K already knew about the universe:

the earth spins
Neptune, Mercury and Venus are planets
Uranus spins with rings sideways
the moon and the sun are not planets
the sun is very hot
astronauts go around space
the sun is a white star
there are dwarf stars

We learned that there are 3 different types of galaxies: spiral, elliptical and irregular, and that we live in one called the Milky Way. Our universe is about 13.7 billion years old and contains at least 100 billion galaxies. Below are some predictions from our class about how many galaxies they thought might exist:

Gracie: 10

Jack: 4

Haley: 107

Harry: 8

Evan and Asher: infinity

Lara: 108

Catherine: 12

When they learned how many there actually are, we counted how many zeroes are in 100 billion, and children remarked that it was almost too many to count!

Our study happened to coincide with InSight’s landing on Mars, so we looked at one of the first pictures it took from the surface of the planet as well as photos of Mars throughout the years. Finally, we watched short clips of rocket ships taking off and landing, which made all of us wish that we could see a launch one day!

Our final "Gg" activity was led by Martine and included experiments with gravity. We apologize in advance if your child tries dropping some household items and comparing which ones lands first.

Check out our Pre-K bulletin board, where you can see the galaxies each Pre-K child created and named (with "Gg" words, of course).

Have a great weekend,

Emily and Martine

Books this week included:

In My Garden

Green

What Do You Do With An Idea

The Grateful Giraffe - a kids yoga-feelings book

Comets, Stars, the Moon and Mars - poetry

Galaxies and the Universe - nonfiction

Go, Dog. Go!

I Fall Down