Has your child asked you about the Moon? Has he/she asked questions such as “what is the Moon?”, “what does the Moon do?”, etc. I have three children, one 13 years old son, one four years old son and one two years old daughter. The oldest reads by himself but my four years old son keeps on asking me difficult questions from “what is electricity?” to “what is a black hole?”. Last time he asked me exactly those questions mentioned in the beginning of this article. I decided to write an article on “how to teach your child about the Moon”.

Little kids are fascinated with stars and the Moon. They do not understand much about them, but they get interested in them because they can see the stars and the Moon, and they can sense something mystical related to them. How could you best teach your child about the Moon in a way that he/she can understand the basics and will become afraid of it. There is always a risk that some mystical objects become scary for children. Here are few good things that you could explain to your child. Go outside or next to window, watch the Moon together with your child or children and tell the following. Later on, I recommend you to check out also my article on how to teach astronomy to your child.

Moon is like the Earth, but without human beings, flowers, animals and other forms of life. It is an object that orbits the Earth. Even though it looks big compared to stars, it is actually much smaller than stars and the Earth. The Moon has a diameter of 3500 kilometers, while Earth’s diameter is about 12 700 kilometers. In this phase it could be nice to compare the size of the Earth to the size of the Moon. You could do this with balloons of the right size. Just calculate the retio and pick up balloons of the right size.

The Moon can easily be seen without a telescope and binoculars. Watch the Moon together with your child now and describe your him/her the craters of the Moon. They are there because meteorites, huge “rocks”, have bombarded the Moon surface during a very long time. Tell your child now that there is no danger that meteorites will crash on the Earth just like in case of the Moon. It is good for a child to understand that there is nothing to worry about.

Next you could tell your child that the Moon has no atmosphere. This causes the fact that there is no oxygen in the Moon and a human being cannot be there without proper equipment. Tell also that human beings have landed on the Moon once in the history, and that a new mission is under planning right now. The Moon is the only object in space that man has ever visited. One of the reasons for this is that the Moon is so much closer to the Earth than other planets.

It takes 27.3 days for the Moon to make one complete cycle around the Earth. You could show this with two balloons, one orbiting the other one. Show how the smaller one orbits the bigger one and tell that one cycle takes around 27 days.

These were the basics of the Moon for kids. Please leave a message if this was useful or you would like to hear something more or you would say something different. You might also consider subscribing to my RSS feed or email updates in the top right corner of this page.