Over the next few weeks we are going to be exploring the night sky through stories, songs, arts and crafts and through all aspects of our play.

It is less than two weeks now until Baby Tilda’s anniversary.

One year of being an angel, a star in the sky.

Esther and William love the dark.

Torch walks are a regular activity now and we have regular torches and also ones that project stars and planets onto any surface you shine them on.

We also have star projectors that we use for our special Tilda times.

Last week we watched CBeebies Stargazing and also enjoyed Nina and the Neurons explorations of the night sky.

Esther and William kept asking if they could make a moon and so we did.

We made lots of different moons and still have more to finish and make.

We are loving our adventures with the night sky.

We started our exploration with Eric Carle’s Draw Me A Star.

Esther and I practised drawing stars, following the instructions in the book, we then cut them out and decorated them with tissue paper and glitter. The end results were rather lovely and I am going to do them again in a few days using tracing paper and tissue paper to make sun catchers for our windows.

Sticking with stars we decided to use felt as a background for a starry sky picture.

We created comets and shooting stars with glitter and glue then added different jewels and sparkly stars to adorn our skies.

I really love these felt skies. The are easy to make and they look stunning with all the different colours and textures.

We use stickers lots in our house. We used some lovely sparkly foam stars on shiny holographic paper to make a different starry sky.

Again these are really simple to make and an easy activity to set up and clear away. They are great travel activities too. Just some special paper and a pot of stickers and a long train journey is filled with starry fun.

We used space stickers to create a space scene. Again these were foam stickers that I bought from Amazon. We stuck them on to shiny card to make a striking space scene.

Once we had finished our stars and sky scenes, it was time to move on to the moon. We reminded ourselves all about the moon by reading I Took The Moon For A Walk and Jill Murphy’s, Whatever Next.

At the end of the story of I Took The Moon For A Walk there is an explanation of the phases of the moon.

We decided to paint a night sky and then make and paint the different phases of the moon.

For the night sky we made grey paint, hazy purple and shady blue by mixing white into the different colours. we then blended streaks of each colour together on the paper. We then added sparkle to the sky with glitter. Esther and William worked independently and I was really pleased with their results.

We used the same paint for the moon phases but tried to make them different from the sky so that they would stand out.

We made crescent moons, half moons and full moons using cardboard.

I was really pleased with the pictures when we put them all together.

Once we had looked at phases of the moon, Esther and William were keen to do it again. We used a slightly different approach with our second look at the moon. We painted the phases using marshmallows to create pattern and texture like craters on the moon. Esther and William loved this different approach and we didn’t eat too many of the mallows.

This activity has given me the idea of making Marshmallow Moons by sticking the marshmallows onto a moon shape to make a textured moon surface. I think it would be great fun to do and could look stunning.

Our current moon project is still very much a work in progress. Our paper mache moons. I think they deserve a blog post all of their own really but here is a sneaky peek of what we are trying to do.

Our playroom is becoming full of stars and moons and things from the sky, just in time for Tilda’s anniversary. We are loving all our different activities and they are quite therapeutic for mummy too.

We have lots more night sky project coming up.

I hope you will join us on our journey.

Through the skies.