Through a Twitter contact, I found out information about the International Observe the Moon Night, which is held on October 8th. Somehow, I had not heard of the event. The Lunar and Planetary Institute is providing some kits to school media centers and public libraries that host an event. As soon as I heard about all of this, I knew this would be a fantastic event for our community.
I immediately contacted my principal, and he was interested. We chatted about it, and he thinks it is a great idea. We are going to invite all of the schools in our clusters to participate with students and families. We are a preK-12 cluster, so we should have a wide range of participants.
I am planning our activities right now. I’ve decided we’ll open the evening with a short presentation about the moon. For the remainder of the evening, families will be able to meander throughout several activities. We will have stations about scale size and distance of the Earth and moon, a moon passport to learn features of the moon, moon phases flipbook, color pages, lunar storybook corner, moon photography, share your moon stories, a lunar timeline, and write your own lunar poetry. We will also have the NASA lunar samples on hand to share with families and the Atlanta Astronomy Club will help us with our lunar viewings.
I am really excited about how quickly this is all coming together. I expect it will be an amazing evening! If you have any information or expertise you’d like to share with us, please let me know.
