Astronomy Project

I mentioned in an earlier post that Sareny finished up the year with a pretty big astronomy project. Part of it was the 3-d model of Saturn she made. She also had to make a poster about Saturn, write a paper on Saturn, and create a board game with at least 5 facts each about the earth, moon, and sun. She was really responsible with this project and worked really hard, but let's be honest here. She didn't do it alone, folks. Except for the paper--she worked on that at school and I never even saw it.

This is the poster she created. The silhouette machine really came in handy on both of these projects. We cut Saturn out of sparkly gold vinyl, and the miniature stars are cut from some glittery white paper. She was required to draw at least one of the pictures for her poster, and she decided to water colored the picture in the middle. Over all, it turned out really nice.

The real masterpiece of her collection, however, had to be her board game. This thing looks so good, you practically could have bought it at a game store. I thought we were supposed to go all out on this project, then I found out that some of her classmates were just working on their gameboards entirely at school, and I realized we had taken the board game to a whole new level. Most of the other kids did Candyland style games, but I thought we could think of something more fun to play than that and had the "brilliant" idea to style the game after the Settlers of Catan with simplified rules. The facts were all printed on the appropriately colored hexagon tile, which made it look really nice. If you look at all the detail and work this board game entailed, you can see why I later questioned the "brilliance" of the idea...

You can't see the sparkliness in the pictures, but the title, moon, stars, and her name are all cut from glittery paper. She selected pictures of the moon for the background that looked kind of like people building a settlement there.

We used round tokens for the production cards and printed off building costs cards for each player. We also took the game board and cards to get laminated so it would hold up with kids playing it.

Keith and Sareny measured, cut, and sanded all these little road and house pieces, and then Sareny and I painted them the colors she selected.

It was only after the three of us had spent most of a weekend working on these projects that Sareny mentioned her teacher had said she wanted them to look like a third grader did them, not a high schooler. That's when I said, "Uh-oh Sareny, because these look like a college student did them..." Part of the reason Sareny wanted her game to look good was because her teacher was going to keep the best couple of them for her students to play next year, and she wanted hers to be picked. After she worked so hard on it, however, she had second thoughts. Apparently her teacher recognized how much work Sareny had put into this project, because she told Sareny that it was up to her whether the teacher kept it or not. Well, we brought it home with us the last day of school, so if you're up for a game of Settlers of the Moon, stop on by. :)

It actually is really fun to play. Now we're just kind of dreading when Isaac gets this assignment in third grade, because he is already planning his game out...