Tuesday, August 22, 2017

Celebrating the Solar Eclipse


Thanks to our impending and unexpected move, I was not as prepared as I would like to have been for the solar eclipse, but we managed to have a pretty fun day.


We had eclipse viewer glasses, but I wanted to make a pinhole viewer so I could take photos with my cell phone. I had forgotten to do that before today, though, so I had to be quick about it. I remembered seeing a picture of "2012" projected through a pinhole viewer, so I added a "2017" to mine. It was so cool, so I made more viewers with all the kids' names and my name and a heart and today's date. I only wish I'd had time to have the kids make designs.


It was neat to see how the images changed as the eclipse progressed.


While were outside viewing, my seven-year-old son and I made some observations about nature. When we first got outside, there were some ants out and about, and we received a few bites. After a little while, I noticed the ants were still around but not biting. Then the ants disappeared altogether. I sat in the grass, ant magnet that I am, and didn't see a single ant for about 45 minutes. Suddenly, they reappeared. A few minutes later, they started biting again, so we went inside, the best of the eclipse behind us. As we discussed our experience, my son pointed out that the breeze had stopped. He was right! There was no breeze a few minutes after we got out there, which I noted when I was able to stop adjusting my viewing paper because it was no longer moving. Shortly after we came inside, the breeze picked up enough to aggravate our motion-activated camera. Fascinating.


I wanted to make eclipse shirts, but I hadn't gotten to the store, so we made chalk art for the walls using cupcake liners as stencils.





When my hard-to-impress nine-year-old pulled off her stencil, she said, "COOOOOL!"





I stumbled upon an eclipse keepsake worksheet a few hours after the eclipse and had my children complete it. Nothing beats documenting their handwriting and spelling in these early years.
(I found the worksheet link in a HUGE list of resources by Life of a Homeschool Mom.)

Mikey, 7: "Geting to look at it" 
Ellie, 9: "it lookt like a fingernail moon"
(That's what she's always called a crescent moon)
Angela, 6: "See moon in front of sun"
(She wasn't the most willing participant in this.)
I wanted to do something fun and eclipse-y for dinner to finish out the day, but I didn't quite get there. Instead, we had eclipse cookies for dessert.



Overall, it was a good day for having been completely unprepared and getting less than 70% coverage. (And knowing we're moving to the path of totality in two weeks. Two weeks! How unfair is that?!)

What did you do to celebrate the eclipse? Were you in the path of totality? Did you blog about it? Share with me!