Make a Planet Pizza

Since Jackson (my almost 4 year old son) loves all things outer space, I decided to do something fun and make this SPACE WEEK at our house! We all went to the book store this weekend and Jackson picked out a new book about space, My Tourist Guide to the Solar System . . . and Beyond.

The book kind of takes the fun and different approach of traveling through space and visiting the planets as a "space tourist". Jackson has enjoyed reading it and it's full of tons of scientific info and facts but also has lots of big, colorful pictures to hold his attention. We've already read through it a few times and he's learning new things each time we do. He also likes the little astronaut key chain that comes with it and has been placing him on top of each of the planets so he can "visit it". Too cute!

So to kick off Space Week tonight we made Planet Pizzas for dinner. Anyone who knows Jackson knows he's a pretty picky eater...  I'm happy to say that he loved making his planet pizzas and gobbled them up for dinner!  :) We decided to make an Earth pizza and a Mars pizza.  I'll walk you through how we did it! It's really easy and is a fun hand's on activity for your child to participate in.

To make the pizzas, I used two kinds of shredded cheese (mozzarella and cheddar), whole wheat thin bagels (you could also use whole wheat sandwich rounds or english muffins) and a jar of alfredo sauce. Since we needed to dye the sauce blue and green for the Earth pizza, I needed a white sauce (which worked out perfectly for me anyway since Jackson dislikes tomato sauce!). For the Mars pizza, you could use tomato sauce or just dye the alfredo sauce red like I did. To color the sauce I used my favorite Wilton gel colors that I also used in my rainbow cake tutorial since they give such bright and bold colors, much more so than regular food coloring.

First we poured the alfredo sauce into 3 bowls.

Then we put a little bit of our Wilton gel colors into each bowl in the colors we needed - red, green and blue, and mixed them all up.  Jackson had fun mixing in all the colors!

We talked about how the pizzas are round just like the planets.

Then Jackson spread the sauce onto the thin bagel halves. First we did Earth, he spread the blue all over and then plopped on a little green and I helped him spread that on top of the blue to make it look like our world. Then he spread the red on for his Mars pizza.

Then Jackson sprinkled some shredded cheese onto the pizzas - white (mozzarella) onto Earth and orange (cheddar) onto Mars.

Jackson was so proud of his planet pizzas!

While they were baking (350 degrees for about 7 or so minutes, until the cheese is melty), we talked about the 2 planets, the colors they are and what makes up those colors (sea, rock, trees, clouds, rusty dirt, etc). And then they were ready to eat!

Jackson LOVED them and ate them both up! Now if only eating dinner could always be that fun and easy  ;)

Our plans for the rest of space week include:
Wednesday:  A fun planet painting activity I found on Play at Home Mom
Thursday:  A trip to the Adventure Science Center to check out the planetarium  

 Jackson will probably run around outside one afternoon in his rocket ship super hero cape that he loves playing in! Maybe he'll even wear it to the planetarium  :)  Then this weekend my husband and I will probably get a little work done on his big boy room that he'll be transitioning too... the theme of his room is going to be Star Wars of course for my space loving boy! I'll be sharing my plans for his room soon!

Pin It