Best for ages 4–10. Space is one of the few topics where a four-year-old and a ten-year-old can do the same activity and both get something out of it — the younger one because it is big and glowing, the older one because the numbers are genuinely astonishing.
These are the space activities that work at a kitchen table, with things you already own.
Ages 4–6: scale you can see
- Balloon rocket. Thread string through a straw, tape an inflated balloon to the straw, let go. One minute to set up, twenty minutes of demands to do it again.
- Moon craters in flour. Fill a tray with flour, dust cocoa powder on top, drop marbles from different heights. The craters look exactly like the real thing, and the “why is that one bigger” conversation writes itself.
- Draw the moon. Follow the steps in how to draw the moon, then colour the craters in from the flour tray.
Ages 7–8: making the numbers real
- Toilet-roll solar system. Unroll a strip of toilet paper down the hallway and place the planets at scale. Nothing explains how empty space is quite like walking from Saturn to Uranus.
- Constellation cards. Punch holes in black card in the pattern of a constellation, hold it up to a window. Then find the same shape outside after dark.
- Shooting star drawing. Our how to draw a shooting star steps make a good quiet wind-down after the loud experiments.
Ages 9–10: questions with real answers
- Phases of the moon with a lamp. A torch, a ball and a dark room reproduce every moon phase. This is the activity that makes the concept finally click.
- Track the real moon for a month. Draw its shape each night on a calendar. Slow, and the only one on this list that teaches patience.
- Build a scale model of Earth and the Moon. A tennis ball and a peppercorn, placed the correct distance apart, is usually a surprise to adults too.
What to skip
Bicarbonate-of-soda “rocket launches” are a lot of mess for a small result, and papier-mâché planets take three days of drying for something that gets thrown away. If you only do one thing from this page, make it the flour craters — best result per minute of setup by a wide margin.
Free printables to go with these
Pair any of these with a printed page: our moon colouring pages and the wider nature colouring collection are all black and white and print at home.
Last updated 5 August 2026 by Nora Whitfield.