Excerpts from Primarily JASON, Compiled  by
Gerogene Lytle
Kean Elementary School
Wooster, Ohio.

Setting the Stage:

Use Mysteries of Earth & Mars as your teaching theme for the year.
Decorate your classroom accordingly.

Set up a solar system exploration center. Load it with books about the planets, Mars, Earth. Get children excited about Mysteries of Earth & Mars by allowing them to preview what they will learn.

Use a large box to construct a rocket ship in the reading corner. Stock it with plenty of space-related reading material and appropriately stuffed “creatures”.

Send your students a welcome back to school letter on space-theme stationery. Tell them about what you will be studying.

The first week of school, have your class “dress” themselves as astronauts. Using the digital camera, take a picture of each student (face only). Have them cut out their face and glue it to a pattern of a body then dress themselves in a space suit. Glue the rim of a small paper plate around the face to create the space helmet.

Coloring pages:

• Enchanted Learning: Mars printout/coloring page http://www.enchantedlearning.com/subjects/astronomy/activities/coloring/Mars.shtml

• Dover Coloring Book: Mars Exploration Fact and Fantasy ISBN 0-486-41864-2; cost $3.95

• The Space Place Coloring Book http://spaceplace.nasa.gov/en/kids/coloring_book/index.shtml#

Ongoing Activities:

Morning Work

Correct factual sentences about Mars and teach the mechanics of language at the same time!

Start your day with "morning work". Find facts about Mars @ http://cmexwww.arc.nasa.gov/CMEX/index.html under the Science heading OR @ http://www.exploringmars.com/science/ataglance.html . Write facts on the board without capitalizationor punctuation each morning and have students correct the errors. Once corrected, have students enter the facts into a booklet about Mars and illustrate; OR alternate facts about Mars with facts about Earth to create a booklet that compares and contractsthe two planets. Information comparing Earth & Mars can also be found @ http://cmexwww.arc.nasa.gov/CMEX/index.html under the Science heading.

Find out what day it is on Mars. Check out the link to the Martian calendar @ http://cmexwww.arc.nasa.gov/CMEX/index.html  under the Calendar heading. Mars Year One is referenced to Earth year 1976, the year of the first successful landing on Mars.

JASON Journals/Portfolios:

Space Dictionaries: Have children keep an ongoing illustrated space dictionary. Use spiral bound notebooks with tabs. As students learn a new word, have them write a definition, illustrate, and add to their dictionary.

JASON Experience Journal: Students of any age can keep JASON journals. At the end of each day children should write a sentence or two about what they have observed and/or learned about JASON that day.

Simplified JASON Booklets: The teacher can go through the curriculum and copy pictures, maps, etc. to create a simplified JASON booklet for younger students to record their information in. These booklets can be either hole punched then organized in a three-ring binder OR pre-bound with plenty of blank pages in between. Vocabulary words can also be included with spaces to write and/or illustrate meanings. All student work (journals, graphs, stories, reports, drawings, poetry, etc.) can be collected and kept in JASON portfolios. Create portfolios by folding and stapling large pieces of tag board into giant envelopes.

Weather Activities:

Read Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs for a fun introduction to weather. Have students use Kid Pix to create their own creative version of the weather.

Have children illustrate how a water cycle works. Make a water cycle wheel. Instructions @ http://www.epa.state.il.us/kids/fun-stuff/water-cycle/

Learn about clouds @ www.brainpop.com/science/weather/clouds 

Create charts of different clouds. Use white paint & clear glitter for cirrus clouds. Use cotton balls for cumulus clouds. Use cotton balls colored gray with a marker and pulled thin for stratus clouds.

Use a digital camera and take a picture of the sky each day. Post in sequence. Write a description of the weather underneath the picture - temperature, precipitation, etc. Guide the children into making generalizations between the kinds of clouds they observe and the weather.

Available from NASA - Teacher’s guide: A Look At Weather, Activities for the Primary Student. This book addresses kinds of weather, forecasting, weather lore, weather on Mars, etc.

Have a student serve as the weather person for the day. Look up the forecast for your area as well @ http://www.weather.com/ . This site also has a converter that changes Fahrenheit to Celsius.

Plot the information onto an ongoing line graph (using large graph paper from a roll). Graph in Fahrenheit, Celsius, or both.

Color in thermometers to show the average daytime and nighttime temperature. Compare & contract to your area by also marking your average daytime and nighttime temperatures. Use Fahrenheit and

More advanced - Do a line graph of average monthly temperatures and /or the average monthly rainfall in your area.

Keep an ongoing chart comparing the times of the daily sunrise/sunset. Calculate number of daylight hours.

Find out the 5-day weather forecast for your area. Graph (in red) the predicted highs and lows. Draw an illustration indicating whether sun, clouds, or precipitation are expected. Then graph the actual temperatures in blue. Compare to the predictions.

For More Primarily JASON ideas, tips, websites, and lesson starters, download the entire Primarily JASON PDF created by Gerogene Lytle, Kean Elementary School, Wooster, Ohio.