Painting Planet Lights

For Day 2 of our "Space Week" we followed this fun tutorial from Play at Home Mom to make our own light-up solar system. If you missed Day 1 of "Space Week", you can read about the planet pizzas we made for dinner last night here.  

To make our glowing solar system, we followed the tutorial and purchased 2 packs of Tap Lights from Walmart; they each contained 4 small tap lights and were about $4 a pack. I also purchased some foam brushes, which I found worked really well for this project to spread the paint on the lights (probably better than traditional paint brushes), and a small paint tray.

The store we were at was out of most of the glass/enamel paint that Play at Home Mom suggested, so I just bought a few bottles of what they had and used acrylic paint that I had at home for the rest of the colors I needed. The acrylic paint worked fine, FYI, so there's no need to purchase glass/enamel paint for this project! In fact, the glass paint chipped off some afterward and will need to be sealed with mod podge, but the acrylic paint has stayed put... so I'd definitely recommend regular acrylic paint!

We also used the same planet book that we used to make our pizzas, My Tourist Guide to the Solar System . . . and Beyond to guide us as we painted our planets.

 

Checking out the tap lights

Counting the 8 tap lights to represent the 8 planets in our solar system. Yes, I still have a hard time saying that... I miss you, Pluto!

Concentrating hard while painting our planet Earth.

Having fun painting Mars.

Checking out the colors in Saturn.

Proud of his planets!

They came out so cool!

We took them into his room after so we could see them really glow well in the dark.  

Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune

Jackson enjoyed looking at his planets.

Our solar system

This was such a fun project and we had a great afternoon. Jackson wanted to read his book again after we finished painting and checking out our planets in the dark. Tomorrow we're headed to the Adventure Science Center where we'll check out the Space Chase which looks to be filled with lots of fun and educational space activities. 

We also have a really fun trip planned for this weekend! We've been wanting to check out the US Space and Rocket Center in Huntsville, Alabama for a while now and what better time than now during our "Space Week". I know Jackson will get a kick out of seeing the big rockets and it will be a fun little trip for our family since Huntsville is only about 2 hours away!

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