Oreo Cookie Moon Phases

I was looking through my pictures for a picture of my son that I need for something I am making when I came across some pictures of a little math/science thing I did in my room a few years ago (this was pre-blogging days ;) )  Since the pictures were just sitting there, I thought I would share.

We were reading all about space in our language arts unit and, being the thematic planner I am, I decided to bring a little math and science into the mix.  So what did we do??  Oreo Moon Phases! 

Anyone notice the t-pins? ;)

I found a moon calendar in one of my teacher resource books.  For a month (which actually ended up overlapping two months because of when we started), the students went outside and looked at the moon.  They drew what they saw and tried their best to identify the type of moon that was present.  The kids did a pretty good job at this, but we did have to do a little bit of checking on the site Moon Phases. 

Once the calendar was done, the students then did a little number crunching.  We were studying fractions at the time, so the students figured out the fraction of the month in which each phase of the moon was present.   They also had to simplify that fraction.  I had the students handwrite the chart, but I have created one for you just in case you want one to print off.  You can get it here.  (I realize there was a little error made on the part of the student on the number of times the full moon appeared on this page shown, but that is a scientific error...the math was the focus here ;) )








Next came the fun part.  The students were given eight mini-Oreo cookies (I used mini because they, quite frankly, were cheaper.  Buying enough cookies for 36 students was going to cost quite a bit ;) )  I had each student show the various moon phases using the white filling in each cookie.  You can see in the picture that the new moon was the easiest to create!  Then, using toothpicks, the kids molded each of the other phases.  I also had them label the phases.

You can see from this picture that the Oreos did leak the grease all over the place.  This was largely because when the projects were done, before I put them on the bulletin board, I stacked them on top of each other.  The grease from the white filling actually was the culprit in this case.  So I wouldn't recommend doing that ;)  Otherwise, this was a fun project that I may just do again someday!  Have you ever done this?