Unschool Rules

Solar system and space unit study guide for homeschoolers and unschoolers

One of the “learning kicks” that kept Ashar’s interest for a year or more was outer space.

Ashar’s been a longtime Star Wars fan (and recently became interested in Star Trek). Then, when he caught a clip from the series “From the Earth to the Moon” at an event we attended, he started wanting to know more and more about lunar exploration.

So on one of our trips to the library, we checked out a Neil Armstrong biography and read it cover-to-cover together. That was over the span of a couple months, but Ashar’s interest didn’t wane.

Disclosure: This post has some affiliate links. I only link to things we legitimately use and recommend, so if you see such a link, it's because we really do believe in the book or item!

So we started digging around for more solar system stuff, but Ashar kept beating us to the punch! The Mars Rover Curiosity’s trip was news to me – but not to Ashar, who’d started following the rover on Twitter. The same was true for the SpaceX Dragon mission – Ashar was the one who told me about it!

But with some help from Homeschool AV Guy, aka Ashar’s awesome dad, Chris, we found some great space resources, especially related to the U.S. moon missions.

Here’s a look at some of the many highlights of our study so far. I hope this will prove a great starting point – or diving-deeper point – for anyone interested in learning more about our solar system!

Books

Neil Armstrong (Sterling Biography series) – This was the book that started it all for us! It’s a great read for anywhere from a third-grade through an eighth-grade level.
Space: A Visual Encyclopedia – This is one of the DK Books series, and it’s great for browsing and researching.
13 Planets: The Latest View of the Solar System – A National Geographic title, which means of course Ashar loves it!
Solar System: A Visual Exploration of All the Planets, Moons and Other Heavenly Bodies that Orbit Our Sun – I’d actually browsed through another book in this series about the periodic table of elements, and this one looks even cooler. The imagery includes both photographs and computer simulations and is phenomenal. Kids will love it, and there’s detailed info for adults or older students to read.
There’s No Place Like Space! – Great for younger kids, this is a factual book from the Cat in the Hat Learning Library series.
Midnight on the Moon – This fictional book is part of the incredibly educational Magic Tree House Series (it’s Book 8, if you’re checking your library shelves). Accompanying it is Magic Tree House Fact Tracker: Space, a nonfiction companion. I can’t say enough about this series, which Ashar loved when he was younger!
This Place Has No Atmosphere by Paula Danziger – I read this fiction book when I was about middle-school age, and recently reread it. It’s a fascinating middle-grade or even high-school read – and surprisingly informative about what life might be like on the moon in the future!
Buzz Aldrin’s autobiography, Magnificent Desolation – This is a book more geared toward adults or older teens. It’s a fascinating read that I really enjoyed, more about Aldrin’s life AFTER the moon.

Movies/TV

From the Earth to the Moon – This is the HBO miniseries documenting the U.S. missions into space and particularly those surrounding the moon landings. It is phenomenal. Tom Hanks is executive producer and episode-intro narrator. (Also interesting: The episode intro for each includes audio of John F. Kennedy’s speech Sept. 12, 1962 speech promising we will go to the moon in that decade, which Ashar absolutely loves and has memorized parts of.)
Apollo 13 – I had never seen this from start to finish, believe it or not, but I’m incredibly glad I did. While there are a few notable liberties – like, you know, “Houston, we have a problem,” this is pretty close to the story of what actually happened. Watching this and then watching the accompanying episode of From the Earth to the Moon was a neat study in comparisons.
The Right Stuff – This film is based upon the first astronauts, the Mercury Seven team (including Gus Grissom, Deke Slayton and John Glenn). We’re slated to watch this next!
In the Shadow of the Moon – We picked up a copy of this incredibly cheaply at a book and movie outlet on our Rehoboth Beach vacation. It includes interviews with most of the astronauts who walked on the moon, though notably not Neil Armstrong. Seeing these men later in life is fascinating in its own right!
For All Mankind – This film from the Criterion series is a documentary about all 24 men ever to land on the moon, told in their own voices. We haven’t watched this yet, but Chris raves about it and it’s in our queue!
Cosmos – This is the Carl Sagan miniseries originally broadcast on PBS, probably one of the most noted pieces of space television ever aired.
The Planets – This is one of the BBC Films documentary series, and if you’ve never seen those, you’re missing out. We have several of their box sets and they’re fantastic; this one included.
A Trip to the Moon – This early science-fiction silent film imaged what it would be like to travel from the earth to the moon. Amazing to compare what was and wasn’t accurate!
Spacecraft Films – Here, you can literally get every minute of footage taken on the various space missions in DVD form here. GREAT for aficionados!

Toys and games

Ashar is saving up to try to buy some of the larger space Lego sets. Some of his favorites:

Lego Shuttle Expedition
Lego Space Center
Lego Education Space and Airport Set
Lego Space Shuttle
Lego Space Moon Buggy (This one wins the “in our price range” award, and in fact we have a couple!)

Another just-for-fun favorite has been I Spy Universe, a Nintendo DS game Ashar bought when he first got his 3DS.

Music

Many thanks to my friends on Facebook for a TON of great suggestions here! NOT all of these are appropriate for all ages, though Ashar has heard them all. Some are loosely about space, some use space as a metaphor for other topics, and some are factually-based “learning songs.” If you have 45 minutes or so, I really do recommend listening to the Holst orchestral suite, as that’s one I played several movements from in high school band and it really does speak to you about the nature of each planet as you hear them.

You might also like this 15-minute music lesson on music inspired by outer space, which offers a really cool look at a huge variety of space-related music!

Places to visit

NASA’s Wallops Island flight facility – You might remember we almost sort of visited this when we went to Chincoteague, Virginia, this summer. We hope to return in the spring for a tour! As I mentioned in that post, we’d found a lot of info on chances to watch rocket launches there.
Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum – This was a big part of our summer visit to Washington, D.C. Even if you can’t go in person (and I highly recommend it; admission is free), there are great online tours via the website.
Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum Udvar-Hazy Center at Dulles Airport – We didn’t get to see this on our D.C. trip, unfortunately, but it is actually home to some of the larger space vehicles that don’t fit in the main collection. We’re planning to go back for this one!
Locations of the four decomissioned space shuttles – If you’re able to go to California, New York or Florida, you can see space shuttles Endeavor, Enterprise and Atlantis respectively. Space Shuttle Discovery is now at the Udvar-Hazy Center! (Each of those other locations has an accompanying space museum, not the least of which is the Kennedy Space Center at Cape Canaveral, Florida. Those are probably awesome, but I can’t speak to them as I’m more of an East Coaster!)

NASA Wallops Island Flight Facility

Online resources

Constellation Study Free Printables – Christine Zell from This Bit of Life has put together a super-cool set of resources for studying constellations in particular, including printable cards that can be used for identification, for fact-of-the-day reading or as flashcards!
Astronomy Calendar Connections – This resource over at 1+1+1+1 is something we used when Ashar was in middle school and loved. A fact a day about space!
How far away is the moon? This is a Veritasium video – an awesome science series!
Star size comparison – This video shows how our sun ranks among other celestial bodies and is pretty amazing.
Several space unit study boards on Pinterest – There are literally hundreds of great ideas here; I could spend all day sharing just those.
NASA eBook features – Generally designed for older students or adults, these are digital guides published by NASA on everything from shuttle re-entry to the development of pressurized space suits. They’re academic-style treatises, but incredible information from the original source.
NASA education home page – This includes a catalog of resources for educators, from CDs to DVDs and more.
The Project Apollo archive – Tons of photos and more here from the Apollo space missions.
Mars Curiosity Rover home page – This whole site is great, but their resources for students include a lot of especially cool things, like Rover free printables and help for research reports.
All about Pennsylvanian Pete Conrad – My friend and fellow Pennsylvania resident Judy shares a great look at this Apollo astronaut’s life and some facts I didn’t know about his struggles with dyslexia.

Have you studied outer space? Any ideas for good resources? Please comment and share; I’d love to add them to the list!

This post is part of an occasional series of “Family Field Trip” posts, combining our own adventures with resources we’ve found helpful. Many of these will work even if you can’t visit in person!

Earlier in the series, we shared free resources to help you learn about Philadelphia, Independence Hall and the Liberty Bell and others to help you learn about and make the most of a visit to Assateague, Md., and Chincoteague, Va. We also took a family field trip to Jim Thorpe, PA, and shared our favorite resources for that!

I’ve also been doing a loose series of posts good for unit studies. An earlier post in that series shared our favorite Phantom of the Opera learning resources!

As I revisited our top 10 posts on this blog from 2012, I stopped and reread a lot of them. It’s kind of like past me giving advice to current me, which is cool.

One that really caught my attention again was 5 ways to constructively deal with your kids’ mood swings. I mentioned in the introduction to that post that I don’t often mention that Ashar lives with Asperger’s, obsessive-compulsive disorder, sensory processing disorder, and attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder.

This isn’t putting my head in the sand – we spent years “getting” those labels and, sadly, they’re not things that go away or get cured. But they are things that can be mitigated, and that’s been the essence of our homeschooling journey: Find ways to limit the things that cause a problem, and find ways to quickly nip rising problems in the bud.

I’ve read some great things recently by other bloggers on how to plan your homeschool for your special-needs student, and how to deal with holiday stress when you have a child with stress-related or stress-exacerbated challenges.

It’s hard for me to explain how hard the holidays are for us, specifically as it relates to sensory challenges. Since we returned home from the last of our Christmas celebrations, Ashar has slept 12 to 14 hours a night, and she’s STILL not back on a moderately even keel. (Excessive sleep is a major sensory-defense response.) She’s bitten her fingernails to the point that the nails are almost missing and they’re bloody and scabbed. (That’s a common OCD response to stress, which is in turn a common Asperger’s trait.)

Sleeping in other beds, sitting on other sofas, eating other foods, using different bathrooms… these are things you take for granted when you travel for the holidays. In our case, we do as much as possible of our celebration at places Ashar spends a lot of time – usually our house, but also at her Nana’s house and my best friend’s house, where she routinely goes and even stays overnight. The more familiar the place, and the closer it is to “home,” the more likely it is for Ashar to be able to process the events.

Travel happens. (Heck, we took a 2007 driving road trip looping a total of 10,000 miles across the United States, though that was before we knew all of what we do now!) But when we combine traveling, new “stuff” (like Christmas toys and clothes), colder weather (also a sensory “ick” for Sarah) and changes in routine, like getting up at different times, well… wow.

We don’t have the types of meltdowns we used to, but the signs are there if you know what to look for.

So our past few days have been as “NOTHING” as possible. We went to see the Hobbit, which Ashar was desperate to see – but we went during the New Year’s Eve overnight showing where there was no one else in the theater, save 3 quiet older teens. She slept in til 3 p.m. one day – and we were purposely quiet to avoid waking her. She hasn’t gotten dressed some days, or showered in… well, let’s not talk about that amount of time – that’s a subject for another post.

And it reminds me of this video, which I’d saved almost two months ago and wanted to share.

Please take the time to watch this – with the sound on, and as loud as you possibly can stand it and then some – and to read the accompanying NPR blog post, Mugged By Sound, Rescued by a Waitress.

This is our life when SPD overwhelms it. And I am so thankful to this video for showing everyone a glimpse at what that’s like.