Learning about rockets

This morning, I noticed some of the students busy making rocket ships out of paper tubes and leftover shape pieces from the other day. Their creations were very elaborate, complete with fins on the sides, cones on the top to help them "fly", and all sorts of smoke and fire coming out the back. I decided to Google some pictures of rockets to help inspire their play.

The pictures prompted lots of different questions about the different shapes and sizes of the rockets (some were long and skinny, some had 3 parts), and about why there was so much smoke and fire coming out of the bottom of some of the rockets. When the students had gathered at the carpet again, I showed them a video of the launch of the space shuttle Discovery (Discovery Launch). We talked about the different parts of the rocket, and how they helped the shuttle take off. The students were very excited to share what they knew about rockets! Later, we used some of those pictures to put together a book of rockets to help further extend our learning.

Maverick built a shuttle out of the lego blocks