Building a Rocket

This month at preschool Joshua 's class is learning about different vehicles. As a culmination of the month the teachers have planned a "drive-in movie" day for the last day of the month. For this special day each preschooler was to make a vehicle of their choice with their parents and bring it to school to sit in to watch the movie. A couple weeks ago we started this project; it was right around the time the space station could be viewed at night and during this time we looked up pictures and information about the space station on the web. When asked what vehicle he wanted to create Joshua changed his mind from his original choice of a police truck to a rocket. The first step to creating Joshua's rocket was to draw up a plan of what he wanted it too look like.

Thanks to Cory hunting down the perfect box at work the rocket began to take shape. Joshua and Cory worked hard on creating the shape of the rocket. Even Matthew had to get in on the action by testing the window to see if he could peek out.

The next step was spray painting the box which unfortunately Joshua couldn't do a lot of, but he was a good supervisor! Joshua really wanted to paint the entire rocket with glow in the dark paint, but at $8 for a tiny can quickly talked him out of it and talked him into creating glow in the dark designs on his white rocket. So what to paint? Joshua decided I should draw stars along the top that he would trace in black permanent marker and then we would paint with the glow in the dark paint.

Once the details were pretty much complete on the outside it was time to add the details to the inside. Joshua decided his rocket needed lots of buttons and a computer screen in which he drew a picture of his rocket soaring through space.

The finished product is a pretty cool rocket that one little boy is very proud of creating and can't wait to bring to school for drive-in movie day!