World Space Week

Today, October 4, 2013, marks the beginning of World Space Week (October 4 - October 10, 2013)!  I'll admit that I had no idea this was World Space Week until yesterday when I was looking through my 6 year old's Scholastic book order form and saw it advertised.  World Space Week was declared in 1999 with the first official celebration in 2000.  According to Wikipedia:

"The choice of dates was based on recognition of two important dates in space history: the launch of the first human-made Earth satellite, Sputnik 1, on October 4, 1957; and the signing of the Outer Space Treaty on October 10, 1967."

World Space Week is the largest annual space event in the world!  Cool!

So what can you do to celebrate this event with your kids?  Here are a few ideas I came up with.

1.  Go to a local planetarium.

2.  Visit a space and/or science museum.

3.  Go out at night and look at the stars.

4.  Ask your kids to find the Moon.  (Okay, difficult this week given that New Moon is today, but that just increases the challenge!)

5.  Visit the NASA website. (Uh...maybe not since it's currently shut down due to the U.S. government shutdown!)

6.  Read a space book with your kids.

7.  Search the web for pictures of the planets.

There are many more that you can come up with, but this week is a great week to do something space related!