DIY Space Model with My Son

I don't know if it was only me or every kid dreams of visiting moon and escaping the gravitational pull in childhood.

Besides gravitational pull, I used to find slowing down of time quite fascinating. If you have watched Interstellar then you will get it.

My son who is 5 years old, also takes a great deal of interest in Space.

One of the reason that he was over the moon when Space Week announced in his school. All days were jam-packed with activities.

On Monday, he wore a rocket shirt to school.

On Tuesday, he enjoyed a lot answering questions related to planets.

On Wednesday, he watched a Space movie which I don't know anything about but he was happy when he came back home.

On Thursday, it was presentation day of another class.

On Friday, it was project day to which he looked forward the most.

A day before, we worked on the project. He can't use scissors properly so I did all the cutting and let him do other stuff like pasting and painting and we strictly followed all his ideas and imagination.

Idea

Astronaut M visits planet Mars to meet his alien friend, Vector.

This was totally his idea.

Materials Used

• Cardboard Box
• White thick paper sheet
• Aluminium Foil
• Extra Cardboard pieces
• Paints

Process

• Cardboard box has 6 sides. I cut three sides as you can see in the picture.

• Then I wrapped remaining structure with white sheet and started painting the walls black.

• My son helped me in the painting. He made galaxies with me and he loved sprinkling stars with white paint.

He was getting edgy when I took out purple, red and gray paints. But when I showed him how these colors together can make galaxies then he couldn't stop making them with me.

Then we cut out round shapes from extra cardboard sheets. Made Earth, Moon and Jupiter.

When it was time to paint Jupiter, he told me to make the storms. I didn't even remember Jupiter had storms.

We also made a small satellite with aluminium foil. My son suggested the name - MINIAC so ofcourse we had to go with it.

I let him stick every thing with double tape on the sky we made earlier.

Then it was turn to work on the Mars surface. I spread the aluminium sheet on the ground. I deliberately made some impressions and left a lot of creases in the sheet. Since it was going to be the ground so I wanted to create some texture.

After fixing the sheet, we painted it with a hint of Red, Burnt and Raw Umber shades. Since it didn't need detailing so I let my son do the painting.

I crumbled some small pieces of aluminium foil to make rocks and hills and painted them as well.

Then we made an alien, an astronaut, a flag and fixed them all with toothpicks in the rocks.

And oh yes, my son had a UFO sharpener, we fixed it as well behind the alien.

The project was done and we were happy the way it looked. It was simple but my it was a great learning process for both of us. It was great activity which helped us spend quality time with each other.