The Best Galaxy Activities for Your Homeschool and Classroom

I’m wrapping up my space camp series today with some of my FAVORITE galaxy activities from the week of camp! We did some exploring about stars, talked about what makes up our galaxy, and made rockets to blast off! If you haven’t checked out my other two posts about some of the activities we did this summer during space camp make sure to take a look:
• Planets Activities & Crafts
• Moon Activities & Crafts

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Study of Stars

When Olivia and I were preparing for our camp activities we remembered we had a new book called Life Cycles: Everything from Start to End. I thought it might have the life cycle of a star in there and sure enough, it did! We grabbed it and brought it to school and it was the perfect resource for us. Take a look at the book HERE. This book is going to become a fast favorite of mine and runs perfectly with the Montessori curriculum. Olivia has already looked through it many times when she has questions about a certain thing. It goes from humans to plants to dinosaurs to bugs to mountains. It is so interesting, even for the adult!

Now Make Your Own Life Cycle of a Star!

To kick off more of our galaxy and space activities, we studied stars! This was my favorite activity that we did all week because there was a lot of creative freedom This would be a GREAT follow-up lesson when you are done with the first Montessori Great Lesson (The Coming of the Universe) if your child has a desire to learn more about stars. Some of the students partnered up and some went at it alone to create their own lifecycle of a star poster. We gave them some little pom-poms, cotton balls, markers, glue, small paper plates, and a black piece of poster paper. Mostly we just used what we had around. The paper plates got thrown in at the last minute when one of the kids suggested them! Using a video that we watched and the lifecycle book, they created their masterpieces.

My favorite part of this activity during camp is that the older kids that could read and understand the star’s life a little better helped the younger kids. Multiage classrooms and homeschool opportunities are so amazing. The teacher has so many opportunities to sit back and watch the children learn and teach each other. Check out some of the projects below!

Make Your Own Constellation!

To continue our study about stars, the kids could make their own constellations using spaghetti and marshmallows. Some of them chose to copy constellations that they already knew of, some chose to copy their zodiac signs, and some created their own constellation completely!

This was a fun activity that they all really enjoyed and could fit each level. The younger kids, which were as young as 5, could make really simple constellations. The older kids, which were as old as 12, could make more complicated constellations and take more time to be precise.

The Bigger Galaxy Picture!

After we spent a day on stars, we moved to the bigger picture and did a few activities relating to galaxies. We learned that there are many different galaxies and they are all different shapes and sizes. It’s important for me to remind you that we did dive too deep into these topics. Camp each day was only about 3 hours and we wanted to cover a lot.

If I were to touch on these things in my classroom or in my future homeschool lessons I would dive deeper and give follow-up choices instead of having things so planned out as I did for camp. During our day focusing on galaxies, we drew a galaxy using black paper & oil pastels. We have Crayola oil pastels and honestly, they are not my favorite. I will likely find a different kind next time I use them. If you have recommendations please let me know in the comments. We also made galaxy bark & galaxy slime! Both were a huge hit, as we thought they would be.

Oil Pastel Galaxies

These little projects are super easy and allow for a lot of creativity. It’s also a little different than a traditional drawing because you get to use black paper! You can add in a bit more of an art aspect when you’re working with oil pastels because the kids learn that they can smear and blend the colors a bit more. This was a really quick activity and most finished in just a few minutes. To add a little fun, we asked each child to tell us a bit about their galaxy if they made it up. They came up with names and what they thought might be in their galaxy too.

Galaxy Bark

One of the last things we did during space camp was made galaxy bark. This, of course, was one of the kids’ favorite things because they got to snack on it when it was done! After we talked about the different things that make up a galaxy-stars, planets, rocks, dust, asteroids, gases, etc-the students got to pick different sized pieces of space and add them to their galaxy! I loved this because each galaxy is unique. We used:

semi-sweet chocolate chips
mini marshmallows
sesame seeds
chia seeds
macadamia nuts
pecans

You can use whatever you have available or that’s easy to find. This was also a great opportunity for a few of the kids to try a couple of things they’d never eaten before.

Honorable Mentions

We really packed in a lot of space and galaxy activities during our 5 days of camp. Some of the activities didn’t quite make my posts but I wanted to mention them anyways to plant the seed in your brain in case you want to do them! Here they are:

Galaxy Slime! Our slime didn’t turn out too well. We used a recipe I googled but will try a different one if we ever do it again. This recipe was saline solution, glue, and baking soda. Plus we added some little pieces of colored foil to spice up the galaxies.
Galaxy Popcorn. This was DELICIOUS and here’s where we got the recipe. I just didn’t get any pictures of it, my bad! Definitely try it if you’ve got a sweet tooth going during your space study.
Rocket ship! We did the ‘ol explode a pop bottle using vinegar and baking soda. Our experiment didn’t go exactly as planned but the kids did manage to get one to pop off the ground. They enjoyed decorated their pop bottles before blasting them off too.

That pretty much sums up our Space Summer Camp of 2021! I hope you enjoyed hearing about what we did and grab some of the ideas for a space unit that you’re doing soon. Space is a really popular topic for kids so might as well expand on it while they’re interested, right? I know I’ll have more to share in the coming months as we go over the First Great Lesson and start our space studies this year.