Astronaut Step Game

Astronaut Step Game

When I first started trying to prepare home school lessons for Spiderman Jr. this summer I had a serious melt down. I was overwhelmed, over loaded, terrified, I could go on. 

It takes an incredible amount of work to home school any child.  I have homeschooled in the past my other children with mixed results and reception depending on the child.  My whole life was consumed by homeschooling when I did it before. If I was not teaching then I was grading, creating lessons, evaluating previous lessons to improve my teaching, researching the topics I was going to teach.  I invested all of myself into teaching my children.  It can be rewarding but it can also be emotionally draining even on a good day.

Our Family life is still not back to what it was before my husband’s accident and I am not sure if it will ever be.  I didn’t know that I could invest the same amount of energy to it that I did last time because the time just is not there.

Thankfully God helped me think of a friend of mine who also home schools.  She listened to me freaking out and shared with me what she does.  Her homeschooling blog is Every Star is Different.  She gave me what I needed by listening and by sharing her units she had already made for school lessons and her planner template. 

I printed out a planning template for every week I am going to teach school. Then I decided to let Spiderman Jr. pick what he wanted to learn about next year.  One hour later I had topics for all forty weeks of school that he was interested in; many of the topic surprised me.

One of the surprises was planets. He had all kinds of questions about them. Thankfully there are a lot of homeschoolers out there who share what they have created with others. It has saved my sanity when preparing to be able to look through someone else’s lesson and pull what will work for our son.  He has watched as I have been preparing now for the last two and a half months and he is starting to get impatient for school to start, which is great.

Sometimes there is not something that will work for Spiderman Jr. particular needs so when I run across this dilemma I will try to share what I have created incase it might help someone else.

I am working on the gym activities for the planets week and this idea popped in my head as something fun. I hope it will be a kinetic way to reinforce his  visual memory of the planets names. Future Author thought it should be called Astronaut Step and I really liked the name so that is the games name. Here is the way I chose to assemble it.

Step#1

Print out mat, spinner, and game card.

(pdf links at the bottom, if you just want to skip the tutorial)

Step#2

Cut out the spinner.

Step#3 

  

Grab some cardboard that the spinner will fit on.

Step#4

                                                 

Sponge glue to the back of the astronaut spinner.

Step#5 

 Flip astronaut over and place on cardboard.

Step#6 

Sponge glue over astronaut to create a small protective coating for when you will flick the spinner with your finger. Let it dry. 

Step #7 

Grab a box cutter.

Step #8

 

Cut out the astronaut.

Step #9 

 

Punch a hole in the astronauts head.

Step#10 Cut out the Game Card

Step#11 

 Grab cardboard the game card will fit on.

Step#12 

Sponge glue on the back of the game card.

Step#13 

       Flip over the game card and place 

                on cardboard.

                  Step#14 

Sponge on glue to create a slight protective coating on the game card.

Step#15

             Cut out the game card.

Step #16 

Cut hole a hole in the game card where the little circle on the game card is located.

Step#17 

Grab a brad.

Step#18 

Place the astronaut spinner on top of the game card and line up the two holes then put the brad through. On the underneath side press the brad to the bottom of the game card to secure the spinner.

Step#19 -Step#??? 

I would recommend that you lay out all pieces first before you cut or tape because some of the pieces look very similar but are not exactly the same and they only fit in one place.Cut and tape where necessary to assemble the game mat. Repeat this step a lot :) 

Don't be afraid to ask for help, I had volunteers for testing:)

The finished game mat looks like this.  Be aware it takes up a lot of floor space so keep that in mind when you start assembling it.

Please remember if you use this game the following terms.

This game is FREE for nonprofit use at home & in the classroom.

If you choose to share this please link it back to this site.

You may NOT sell or host these files as your own.

All images are for noncommercial use only.

*Also be aware that it took me forty nine pages to print the mat at 100% size and a lot of ink.  So you need 52 pages of paper in all to print everything. Click on the links below for the PDF's.

Astronaut Step Game rules and spinner

Astronaut Game Mat

Astronaut Game Card