Stars in Their Eyes

Home-pre-school, second week:

When we did dinosaurs, the kiddos were sick and we couldn't go anywhere. Thusly, we had more time. This week, the "school" thing is rapidly turning into more of a "camp" squeezed into the spare minutes between swimming lessons, trips to playgroup, beach day, the store and the dentist. And our field trips. All of which are pretty darn important too!

But, last week we studied space: You know, the final frontier. Every day we read our "research" books on the planets; stars--constellations, and also where they come from; rockets and the moon landing; and comets and black holes. The whole topic seemed a little more inaccessible to both of them, the pictures in the books harder to understand. (We liked the astronaut's toilet though, haha.) We did our rhymes, and DB persevered in his reading, though it was harder to get him to write any letters. Oh, and we danced to "Age of Aquarius/Let the Sunshine In," 'cause it's fun, and 'cause it's got lots of planet and constellation words in it.

Here are some of our projects: we made a model of the solar system, using our dining room light as the sun. We even labeled a few of the planets:


We also made a "black hole" bean bag game, with the help of PDaniel and his jigsaw. Then we filled up some old socks with beans and tied some sparkly ribbons to them for tails--Voila! Comets. I totally used it in my little-kid piano class too--I quizzed them on their notes while listening to Holst's "The Planets," and they got to toss a comet through a black hole if they got it right.

They also played outside with DB's old stomp rocket, which all kids love.

For treats, we had starfruit,

jello jiggler stars, sun chips and space dogs ( which were....hot dogs), "rocket ships" (which didn't look much like rocket ships, but oh well. They still thought it was cool):

Oh, and on the last day we watched ET and ate Dippin' Dots ice cream (which I called "moon ice cream"). I found some astronaut ice cream at REI, but didn't want to make the drive. Maybe another time. They liked ET, though it was a bit long. CN really liked the John Williams soundtrack.

Then we went on our totally cool field trip to the LA Observatory. It was fun! The observatory is free. If you go during the day, you can see the sun through a special telescope. We'd like to go back in the winter, when we can see through the night telescope at a reasonable hour. DB and CN sat through the Planetarium show quite well, and DB was impressed by it; it was about $15 for the four of us (PDan a student and CN free). DB totally appreciated everything more because we'd been talking about it.