Travis loves the craters on the moon, and is always asking how they’re made. So we’ve done a few fun projects where he gets to make craters, everything from poking holes into clay to making explosions outside. This little project was also another way to add a comforting glow to his bedroom at night. We just needed glow-in-the-dark paint, and a fun tool – q-tips! – and we were ready to start.

First, I marked off a section of dark construction paper with masking tape. The area within the tape would be the moon, and the rest of the paper was for the stars.

We filled in the moon with glow-in-the-dark paint, then used a q-tip to form lots of craters.

The only glow paint we had is actually meant to be squeezed from a tube, not brushed on, so to make stars we squeezed out dots of paint and then smooshed them with a q-tip.

Travis loved this step!

Now we just had to wait until dark. We let the painting dry under bright lights, and transferred to his room at bedtime.

A beautiful glowing (crater-filled!) moon.