Maybe you are wondering and planning how to begin this new school year. Of course, you will begin with the beginning - The BIG BANG. What you do afterwards doesn’t have to be anticlimactic. Last year, I talked with the 6-9 class at the Waseca School in Athens, Georgia about what they wanted to do. After the story of the Big Bang, there was a solar system. We decided to take a journey through the solar system, visiting all of the planets, the sun and the asteroid belt and make a movie of our adventure! I would like to share that process with you as well as the trailer.

We began by dividing up into teams to research each of our destinations in the solar system. These teams would be the experts there. After they had the information they needed, the students worked with me to write their part of the script. All of the ideas came from them, I only helped to refine their ideas, ask key questions and type fast. The script changed to include their ad-libs as we began to rehearse for the production. For costumes, we collected matching knit shirt and pants. We made several belts out of silver lamé fabric over elastic with buckles in the back. I got the logo on the web and printed off NASA labels to wear on our shirts. For the set, I brought in a huge piece of cardboard used to ship a mattress. We cut out a window and spayed the cardboard with silver paint. We made control panels out of construction paper with silver pens and covered them in cellophane to make them look like a glass computer screen.We hot-glued bottle tops for dials and buttons. We painted poster board circles of the correct diameter for each planet to be hung in the window for that specific scene. There was a black plastic (garbage bag) backdrop behind it and cellophane in front. The set was complete.We wanted to add some stop motion action to show our spaceship visiting the planets.We needed to make a model for that. I found a great little video on tube about some homeschoolers making the planets out of balloons stuffed with rice in plastic bags. You can watch it .