Description

What our Moon lesson plan includes

Lesson Objectives and Overview: Moon is a high-interest reading comprehension lesson plan. As such, students will practice various close reading and comprehension skills. In addition, they will learn about this amazing celestial object in the night’s sky. This lesson is for students in 1st grade and 2nd grade.

Classroom Procedure

Every lesson plan provides you with a classroom procedure page that outlines a step-by-step guide to follow. You do not have to follow the guide exactly. The guide helps you organize the lesson and details when to hand out worksheets. It also lists information in the yellow box that you might find useful. You will find the lesson objectives, state standards, and number of class sessions the lesson should take to complete in this area. In addition, it describes the supplies you will need as well as what and how you need to prepare beforehand.

Teacher Notes

The teacher notes page provides an extra paragraph of information to help guide the lesson and remind you what to focus on. It explains that you can teach this lesson in a whole-class setting or as an independent, small-group activity. The blank lines on this page are available for you to write out thoughts and ideas you have as you prepare the lesson.

MOON LESSON PLAN CONTENT PAGES

Introduction to the Moon

The Moon lesson plan contains three content pages. The moon is a big, round rock. It orbits or moves around Earth in a circle. “Moon” comes from an old word that means “to measure.” Long ago, people used the moon to track time. It was like a big clock! The moon is very far away from Earth. In fact, it is about 238,855 miles away! Driving a car to the moon would take you more than five months. That’s silly! You can’t drive a car in space.

The moon sometimes looks close. But it is really far away! The moon is round like a ball. Some parts are smooth. Some parts are bumpy. It looks bright in the sky. It shines like a light bulb in the dark! The moon does not make its own light. The sun shines on the moon. That’s why we can see it. The moon is mostly a gray color. It has lots of holes called craters. A long time ago, a giant rock hit Earth. The crash sent pieces of Earth flying into space. Over time, those pieces came together and formed the moon. This happened more than four billion years ago!

In 1969, humans walked on the moon. Their names were Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin. They were astronauts from the United States. They went to the moon in a spaceship. It was called Apollo 11. Only 10 other people have ever visited the moon. Astronauts go to the moon to learn about space. They study the rocks. Scientists want to know more about the moon. Maybe people will live on the moon one day!

Fun Facts

Let’s look at five fun facts about the moon: The moon has no air. If you weigh 100 pounds on Earth, you weigh about 17 pounds on the moon. You can jump six times higher on the moon than on Earth! The moon has moonquakes, just like earthquakes on Earth. You can see only one side of the moon.

The moon doesn’t always look the same. Sometimes, it looks like a big silver ball. Other times, it looks like a small curve. The moon moves around Earth. We see it from
different angles. The light from the sun makes it seem to change shapes. The shapes are called moon phases. The moon helps the ocean’s tides. Tides are the rise and fall of the ocean. The moon’s gravity pulls on the water. The tides are low tide and high tide. Have you been to the beach? When you see lots of sand, that’s low tide. When the water covers the beach, that’s high tide.

MOON LESSON PLAN WORKSHEETS

The Moon lesson plan includes two worksheets: an activity worksheet and a practice worksheet. Each one will help students solidify their grasp of the material they learned throughout the lesson. You can refer to the classroom procedure guidelines to know when to hand out each worksheet.

MAKE SOME MOONCAKES ACTIVITY WORKSHEET

For the activity, students will first read a story called “The Rabbit on the Moon” at the top of the page. Then they will follow the directions to make their own mooncakes using the supplies you provide. After they finish, they will answer two questions at the bottom of the worksheet page.

MOON REVIEW PRACTICE WORKSHEET

The practice worksheet lists 10 questions based on the content. These questions all relate to the content pages, so students will need to refer to them often for the answers. In addition, each question provides which reading tool the question corresponds to, such as text feature, vocabulary, or comprehension.

Worksheet Answer Keys

At the end of the lesson plan document is an answer key for the practice worksheet. The correct answers are all in red to make it easier for you to compare them with students’ responses. If you choose to administer the lesson pages to your students via PDF, you will need to save a new file that omits these pages. Otherwise, you can simply print out the applicable pages and keep these as reference for yourself when grading assignments.