The first thing I had the kids do on Tuesday was make a design on some construction paper to set out for solar printing. Unfortunately, it didn’t work nearly as well as I’d hoped it would! By the end of the day, hardly anything showed up on our black paper. I had used a bit of red paper in my design, though, and that was completely bleached out - so I made that mental note for the future.

We finished up our ribbon rockets. It took us a few minutes to get the movement pattern in sync to slide them back and forth, but once they got going, we really enjoyed it!

After this, I set them up with some Galaxy oobleck. I started with the cornstarch, and added the water a little bit at a time. THey started squishing it around and honestly, this is the biggest sensory hit I’ve had! They loved the soft texture of the cornstarch, and once we got it to a proper non-newtonian fluid, they couldn’t keep their hands out of it. I added some black, blue, and purple food coloring for them to swirl around as they played, as well as pearl cake decorations and glitter for stars. They were mesmerized!

Turns out they also enjoy having dark blue hands. We were all looking a little smurf-like this week!

After watching our “how does it work in space” video of the day (hair washing), we were pretty much out of time! We went to have a peek at our solar art, which was a disappointing couple of minutes. We decided to leave them there for another couple days to see if they made a better print, and then the kids went back to the oobleck for the rest of the morning. B7 chose instead to make his comet model (the other kids did them in spare time as the week continued), which I never grabbed a picture of - basically, we tied three different colors of ribbon around a stick to represent the three different parts of the tail (shorter ribbon for the coma, and longer ribbons for the gas and dust trails), then scrunched alfoil around the end for the nucleus of the comet. Not super impressive as an activity, but hopefully they’ll remember the general idea of the shape.