For ski week, I asked each of the kids what they most hoped to do in that week. B7 asked to go for a hike. G6 asked to make oobleck. And G3 asked for “space camp” - a girl after my own heart!

Since I had a few odds and ends to do around the house this afternoon (folding a load of laundry, prepping dinner, etc.) I set up this “camp” day with stations-style activities rather than everyone doing the same activities in a certain order at the same time. This also allowed for a slightly different style of activity that I only had one copy of, as they could each participate at different times without just waiting.

Station #1 was the constellation geoboard. I drew out patterns of several commonly seen or referenced constellations. I filled half the cork board with (relatively) evenly spaced pins, and left the other blank, to give them the option to go with creating their own. I gave them loom bands to use to connect the pins together.

Station #2 was an invitation to create their own galaxy drawing with chalk pastels. I don’t think I’ve given them chalk pastels to explore before, so I was excited about this one. We briefly talked about how there were all different shapes of galaxies in my little introduction, and I showed them some images of different types of galaxies.

For station #3, I created a box with glove inserts, and inside, put a variety of tools and itema to manipulate. I beleive I had a couple cups (one full of rice), rocks of a few different sizes, a magnifying glass, spoon, tweezers… I think that was it.

Learn from my mistakes! I still strongly believe that this is a fabulous activity, but the execution needs considerable refinement.

  1. • Know thine children. I know my 3 don’t really do completely open-ended exploration. They thrive off having tasks to complete. And yet, I still gave them this open-ended activity, hoping that the novelty was enough to inspire some ideas. Spoiler alert - it didn’t work. They might experiment and change things up in the process of completing those tasks, but this needed to be much more structured to begin with. Next time, I will include a list of actions - “move rice from one cup to another using a spoon” “Observe three rocks with a magnifying glass - what do you see that is unique about them?” and so on.

  2. • Kid. Sized. Gloves. I have no idea if they exist - I have seen kids disposable latex type gloves, but you really need the length up the arm that you get from dishwashing gloves for extra mobility inside the box. That being said, I would absolutely trade the glove length for something that fit their hand more closely.

  3. • Experiment with different ways to fasten the gloves to the holes in the box, and make sure they stay put. You want some heavy-duty tape here. Masking tape won’t work. Packing tape won’t work. I had no other options. We eventually just took the tape off and let them move more freely - it was way easier than fussing with the attachment points.

  4. • Did you know there is cling wrap that isn’t completely transparent? I did not know this. When I checked the cabinet at work I only looked for a box. Saw the word “saran” and moved on with my life. Oops. Had a bit of a shock when I went to cover the box while setting up!

Station #4 was all about docking at the ISS. They have seen the Dragon docking and undocking, and we reviewed how it works. Each of them made a little spaceship out of lego. We then tied a string around the spacecraft, and tied the other end around their head. The goal was to get the spacecraft to dock cleanly into the cup - can’t go past it or bang on the sides of the cup, and most importantly, no hands allowed! At the end of our day, I also suspended one of the ships between G6 and B7 to see if they could figure out how to work together to dock, which they really seemed to enjoy. B7 definitely took charge of that one - he directed G6 into a specific position and told her to stay put while he maneuvered the rest. He must have felt really confident about it - rightfully, as he got it first try!

At station #5, I challenged each of them to pack their personal items for a trip to Mars. Of course, there’s a catch - the spacecraft is only so big, and has to be a certain weight. Therefore, their selections were required to fit into a box (of arbitrary size) and be under (the arbitrary limit of) 5 pounds. It was cool to see how their opinion of what to bring changed over the course of the time they were working on this.

Finally, station #6 was a crater-drop activity. I collected a variety of different size and weight balls for them to drop into a container of powder, then observed the similarities and differences between balls with different characteristics. We used corn starch as our powder, so we could turn it into oobleck after we finished!