Fun Astronomy Crafts for Young Learners

I actually wrote this post in 2012 and posted it on our former homeschool blog. They are great ideas that you can use with your little ones while exposing them to astronomy in your learning time. Even though my kids are 7 and 8 now, I still plan on doing these activities with them again this year during homeschool! At the time when I wrote this, we were using Apologia Astronomy. Many of the suggested activities were to complicated for her but these were all a great fit while still keeping in line with the text from the book.


We made this handy little craft that shows not only the earth revolving around the sun, but also rotating. It's pretty simple. It's just a paper plate sun and a cardstock Earth and moon with cardstock strips attached by brads. I got the instructions from Preschool Crafts for Kids.

I love any sort of craft involving melted crayon. I've done several of these before but never realized how perfect it would be for a sunshine. We used crayon shavings from yellow, orange, and red-violet. Afterwards, I realized we should have added in some deep red for sun spots. You can find the very easy instructions on Morning Sun Rae . I'm thinking it would be fun to make one of these for every planet!

This looks messy but I promise it wasn't. If you notice in the second picture, the paint stays under the cling wrap! When you pull up the cling wrap, you have a cool swirly ball of fire. We used a q-tip to pull out the sun flares. Just remember to glue down your sun before you put the paint on ;) For more on this idea, go to Mrs. Karen's Preschool Ideas.