The children are rock and rolling through the summer weeks and enjoying the new themes. This week is space week and as usual I will post some fun snacks you can make at home with your little ones.
ASTEROID TREAT
Every kid will love these asteroid treats made from their favorite cereal. Start by melting three tablespoons of butter in a large saucepan. Add one package of marshmallows and stir until completely melted. Remove from heat. Add one box of your favorite cereal (we used Trix®). Once the mix is cooled, shape into three inch balls. These make the perfect space themed treats!
HEALTHY MOON SNACK
Serve up these delicious moon snacks to teach about craters and ridges of the lunar surface! Spread peanut butter, cream cheese or jelly onto plain rice cakes. Slice bananas and put a few slices on the rice cakes. Sprinkle Cheerios® cereal on top of the rice cake. These are a great snack for STEM lessons, VBS or a space themed party!
MOON ROCKS
These moon rock treats will have all the kids contemplating the skies and what might be up there! Take a small sheet of tin foil and ball it up. Unball the foil and place wrapped candy inside. Then re-wrap the candy in the tinfoil, making sure the candy is fully covered.
ROCKET FRUIT KABOBS
Blast off into space with these rocket snacks! Use a glue gun to adhere tissue paper to the bamboo skewers. Cut bananas into slices and slide the slices and grapes onto the skewers. Cut off the top of the strawberry and slide it onto the skewer as a cap! The fruit rockets are ready for takeoff!
SOLAR SYSTEM CUPCAKES
Teach kids about the solar system with these cupcakes! Make a boxed cupcake mix or buy pre-made cupcakes! Frost the cupcakes with blue frosting. Then stretch a gummy ring candy around a sucker and stick the cupcake into the cupcake. Decorate the rest of the cupcake with colored round candies, candy stars, sprinkles and more.
Here are some FUN Space facts you can share with the kids while making any one of these yummy treats:
1. The moon is very hot (224 degrees Fahrenheit, average) during the day but very cold (-243 degrees average) at night.
2. Venus spins clockwise. It’s the only planet that does!
3. One teaspoon of a neutron star would weigh six-billion tons.
4. Sally Ride was the first American woman to fly in space, on June 18, 1983.
5. One million Earths could fit inside the sun!
6. Even in an airplane, a trip to Pluto would take about 800 years.
7. Ham the Astrochimp was the first hominid in space, launched on Jan. 31, 1961.
8. Neptune’s days are 16 hours long.
9. It takes eight minutes and 19 seconds for light to travel from the sun to Earth.
10. The footprints on the moon will be there for 100 million years.
11. A neutron star can spin 600 times in one second.
12. Jupiter is the fastest spinning planet in the solar system (it only takes about 10 hours to complete a full rotation on its axis).
13. Sound does not carry in space.
14. The Earth's core is as hot as the surface of the son.
15. The very first animals in space were fruit flies...they were sent up in 1947 and recovered alive.
16. In 2011, ten-year-old Kathryn Aurora Gray discovered a supernova (a star that has run out of energy, explodes and then collapses before it dies) that no one else had seen before.
17. Europa, on of Jupiter's moons, has saltwater geyers that are 20x taller than Mt. Everest.
18. Saturn's rings are made from trillions of chunks of orbiting ice.
19. Alpha Centauri isn't a star, but a star system. It is 4.22 light years away.
20. One day on Venus is almost 8 months on Earth.
21. Golf is one of only two sports every played on the moon. In 1971, Alan Shepard hit a ball with a six-iron while on the moon as part of the Apollo 14 mission. The other sport was a javelin toss, during the same visit.
22. Jupiter's Great Red Spot is the Solar System's longest raging storm: it has been observed for more than 200 years.
23. Mercury and Venus do not have moons. (They are the only two planets in our solar system that don't!)
24. There are more stars in the universe than there are grains of sands on Earth.