My daughter the astronaut

Some of you may know that our little Ada is slightly obsessed with all things outer space- especially the moon.  She was an astronaut for Halloween this year thanks to Nana finding an awesome costume at TJMax!

She has loads of books related to space and whenever we go to the library she insists on going to the non fiction section and chooses any number of books on the moon or the earth or the solar system in general.  She is adorable.  Her aunt Megan recently gave her an adorable DIY mobile that she has hanging over her bed and she is convinced that she will indeed go to the moon- sometimes her sister, me or her papa even get to come along in her scenarios.

When she sees the moon she comments on it's shape- sometimes it's a "fingernail moon" or a "half a cookie moon", or a "huge moon".  So cute!

This morning the local NPR had a segment on space travel- specifically whether or not humans should land on Mars.  I love the idea that children will grow up dreaming of doing something like that.  Such a sense of adventure and frontier.  And to top it off it rewards being smart and hard working as well as honoring science and problem solving.  Hopefully our girls will grow up valuing these things and longing to further human's understanding of the universe.  But for now, since they are 1 and 3, this is some of the space work we do over here.

I bought one of those Space Tubes and printed images from Google with labels of each item for a matching activity.  They both like to play with the figures too.  Made sure one of the astronauts pictured was a woman :)

We have a nice Melissa & Doug floor puzzle that we put together and I made up another matching activity with the planets.  It's kept all in a box with a placemat of the solar system that Gramma Deb got for Ada over the summer.  It's great because it has little facts on each planet and acts as a guide.  The long sheet is just office paper that I traced planets on and colored in with black marker.  They are connected and covered with clear contact paper.  The planets came from 2teachingmommies space unit.
Sorry I don't have any pics of the girls (Ada) playing with it.  Also, we realized on the first time we put it together that we needed to have a sun, so Ada made one (complete with solar flares) and I laminated it with all the planets and put it in the box.  The planets are labeled on the back so we can check our work.

Much of Ada's artwork lately has focused on space travel as well.  She has been having me label some of her watercolor paintings and it's so hard to do it justice with just a label since she tells a whole story while she tells me what each thing is.

Jupiter

Moon, Earth, Rocketship 

Part of the Moon

Nana, Ada, and I are all going to the moon on a little spaceship

In this one you can see the inside of the Earth, the "red part" of the Earth, South America (that one made me laugh inside when she told me, "It's kind of like America, it's South America"- all in a teacher tone), and the instruction on the bottom was "Don't EVER break the Earth"  There is also an "A" so we know who painted it. LOVE!