Coffee Filter Planets Space Craft for Kids

My preschool students love to make these coffee filter planets! This is a great addition to your list of preschool science experiments and a must-have for your preschool space theme.

The coffee filter planet activity are a cool science experiment that doubles as a beautiful art project. So this activity is not only a ton of fun, but it’s also full of so many opportunities for learning!

To top it all off, the kid-made planet project makes an amazing room display. I think they make the biggest impact mounted to a window, with the light shining through the different colors. But they’d make a great visual aid on the white board, bulletin board, or classroom door as well!

Are you following Fun-A-Day’s Space Theme Pinterest board?

pinnable image of a collage of three pictures of making planet suncatchers with text that reads space craft coffee filter planets

Related: Space Messy Play Ideas

Without fail, whenever we learn about space, the questions my students ask are always amazingly thought-out!

These coffee filter planets are one of my favorite space activities to do with them. Best of all, they’re full of learning.

Table of Contents

How to Make Coffee Filter Planets

I keep calling this a preschool craft, as it has an end goal in mind. However, it is more of a mix of craftiness and process art.

The children don’t need to make their coffee filter planets the same we did, and they get to explore what happens when water is absorbed by colorful coffee filters.

Check out the process in the attached video!

Materials

One of the best things about these coffee filter planets? You can make them with just a few simple materials!

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Prep for the Planet Suncatchers

Cut the eight planets out of coffee filters. I did this free-hand, and the planets are obviously not scaled correctly!

I left Jupiter, the largest planet, as an intact coffee filter. Then I cut out the rest of the planets in descending order by size. I wanted to have them sized differently to help the kiddos see how the planets compare to each other.

I like to read a lot of fun planet books to the children before we make coffee filter planets, so they have a basic understanding of the solar system first.

Real photos of the planets are a must, too! This craft is a fun way to extend their knowledge and help them order the planets.

collage of four individual photos of finished planet sun catchers hanging in a window

Making the Coffee Filter Planets

My son really enjoyed testing out the coffee filter planets, and he had so many plans for more ideas to teach the preschoolers about space!

Here are the colors we went with for each planet (based on observations made from books and photos):

Mercury – gray and brown
Venus – yellow and brown
Earth – green and blue
Mars – red and orange
Jupiter – red, brown, orange, and yellow
Saturn – brown and yellow
Uranus – blue
Neptune – blue and purple

Starting with Mercury, have the kids color in the coffee filter planets with markers.

I’ve found it’s best to do this by putting them on individual paper plates.

By using plates, the inevitable maker mess (and the upcoming water mess) is neatly contained!

picture of a hand coloring a coffee filter with a brown maker to look like mercury

Related: Galaxy Slime

Once the coffee filters are colored in, let the children spray water onto them.

It’s best to thoroughly coat the marker drawings with water without totally drowning the coffee filters.

spray bottle of water spraying a coffee filter covered in blue and purple lines to look like neptune

Remove the coffee filters from the paper plates and place them on a rack to dry. Of course, if you don’t have a rack, no worries! Place them anywhere you have room.

But I’ve found that they definitely dry faster when they’re off of the wet plates.

Once all of the coffee filter planets are dry, put them up in the windows! They make pretty sun catchers, if I do say so myself.

At first, we put them up in the windows with tape, but they didn’t stay as well as we’d hoped.

So we placed the planets on a piece of contact paper that’s taped up in the window, sticky side out. I made sure the planets were labeled too, of course!

four labeled coffee filter planet crafts

Learning With This Planets Craft

Here’s a taste of the early education concepts the coffee filter planets incorporate:

Fine motor skills (coloring and using the spray bottle)
Science (talking about the planets’ locations and other details)
Math (discussing colors, ordering the planets from 1st through 8th, and comparing sizes)
Literacy (all of the oral language involved throughout the craft and the words labeling the planets)

(Please note that we didn’t include the dwarf planet Pluto when making our space suncatchers. We generally talk some about Pluto, and I personally love this interactive site from NASA about it! If my preschoolers want to include Pluto when they do this activity, they absolutely can!)

Done-for-You Lesson Plans

Save time and get right to the playful learning with Preschool Teacher 101’s printable lesson plan sets. Each set includes over 30 playful learning activities related to the theme, along with related printables.

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