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Project: Why Does The Moon Shrink And Grow?
Materials: playground ball, flashlight, dark room
Explanatory details: We've been reading Eric Carle's Papa, Please Get The Moon For Me, which talks about the moon getting smaller and bigger, so to explore that further, we took the playground ball into a dark room and shone the flashlight on it from various angles to see how it could look fully lit or half-lit or dark, etc.
How did it go: Good; a few minutes of entertainment and an introduction to thinking about the moon as a 3-D object.
Things we talked about: The moon doesn't actually shrink and grow, but moving the light changes how much of it we can see, because we only see the parts where the light is shining.
What Junie got out of it: Well, she had great fun aiming the flashlight at the walls and rolling the ball (normally Not An Indoor Toy) around the house. I think she did get the basic idea - at one point I asked how much we could see now and she said "a sliver" which was something from the book. Some risk she's gotten the impression that the sun orbits the moon (because it was going to be way too complicated to do the thing properly, moving ourselves and the ball around the flashlight) but I'm sure we'll sort that out later. (Maybe the younger sibling can be a useful third pair of hands someday...)
(Regarding the frantic pace of Activities here lately: it's keep busy or go crazy here, man. Let's just say I was really looking forward to her being in school today. (She isn't.))
Materials: playground ball, flashlight, dark room
Explanatory details: We've been reading Eric Carle's Papa, Please Get The Moon For Me, which talks about the moon getting smaller and bigger, so to explore that further, we took the playground ball into a dark room and shone the flashlight on it from various angles to see how it could look fully lit or half-lit or dark, etc.
How did it go: Good; a few minutes of entertainment and an introduction to thinking about the moon as a 3-D object.
Things we talked about: The moon doesn't actually shrink and grow, but moving the light changes how much of it we can see, because we only see the parts where the light is shining.
What Junie got out of it: Well, she had great fun aiming the flashlight at the walls and rolling the ball (normally Not An Indoor Toy) around the house. I think she did get the basic idea - at one point I asked how much we could see now and she said "a sliver" which was something from the book. Some risk she's gotten the impression that the sun orbits the moon (because it was going to be way too complicated to do the thing properly, moving ourselves and the ball around the flashlight) but I'm sure we'll sort that out later. (Maybe the younger sibling can be a useful third pair of hands someday...)
(Regarding the frantic pace of Activities here lately: it's keep busy or go crazy here, man. Let's just say I was really looking forward to her being in school today. (She isn't.))
