We're all about space this week and next.... today was one of those activites that just "stuck" with my children - Oreo Moon Phases.
Here is what we did:
I found this cute activity at: Paper Plate Education (I chose to put the project on black paper instead of a paper plate, though.)
We read Does The Moon Change Shape? and talked about why the moon appears to be different shapes at different times during the month. It has a very simple experiment with two children, a flashlight and a basketball - it was the perfect way to illustrate the way the moon reflects the sun's light.
By scraping different sections of the Oreo away we came up with phases of the moon. Here is GMan hard at work:
The project just calls for Oreos and something to scrape them with! We mounted ours on black paper so we can show daddy when he gets home from work!
(I think someone snuck a little bit off of the last Waning Crescent moon, don't you?)