Moon Walking

Last week my class braved the unusually cold weather we've been having here (seriously colder than Alaska here in Indiana!), and studied the moon. My students observed and charted the moon each night for two weeks for homework as part of our moon unit. Unfortunately, the extremely cold temps and cloudy skies caused the moon to only really be visible 3 out of our 14 nights... womp womp.

Not to be discouraged, however, we got a few packages of Oreos and recreated the phases of the moon our own way!

Clearly some of us were more excited than others ;-).

To start we used a diagram to point out and order the different phases of the moon.

After we reviewed and discussed our schema of the moon phases we moved on to the fun part... Oreos!

I gave each student 8 Oreos, and had them carefully break the Oreo's in half. Then, they put the cream side down on their phases of the moon diagram in their moon book.

Some of us opted to eat our tops while we were waiting :-)

 After we had all of our Oreo's put down (note: some of the Oreos cracked in half / the cream didn't come off smoothly - we just did our best the smoosh those Oreos back together). we began creating our diagram of the moon phases. At each phase we came up to the board and identified the shape of the moon according to our diagram, then we removed the cream on our Oreos to create the phase. When we finished we had all eight phases of the moon.

Delicious Moon Phases!

 In the interest of transparency this activity was really difficult for some of my kiddos. Some of them had a hard time removing the cream from their Oreos, or grew frustrated when their diagram didn't perfectly match the picture diagram. In the future I think I would buddy up some of my students who struggle with fine motor issues with students who excel in that area, and I think that would help ease some of the frustration. Either way - it was a perfect opportunity to talk about trying our personal best rather than being perfect!

In the end the students really enjoyed this activity, and it was a great way to learn about the phases of the moon both visually and physically.

 In the end, who doesn't love Oreo's for breakfast on a Friday?!

If you liked this activity please download for free on TpT as part of my Moon Unit.

Leave a comment and tell me...

What activities have you done for the moon?

If you've done the Oreo activity before, what did you do for those kiddos who had trouble getting their cream off?