On Wednesday, we started out by painting our own planets! I’d picked up a large styrofoam ball for each of the kids, and we came back to this activity a few times throughout the day so they could let it dry between painting different sections, making it easier to hold. I was surprised that both of the older kids chose blue and green to make earth-like planets. We’d talked before we started about all the different ways that we could get lots of different colors just on earth (grey for rocks, yellow sand, red lava, white snow, and so on), but they were happy with their creations, so I can’t complain!

Next, we pulled out or distance scale model of the solar system and played Saturn Ring Toss, using both a ring-style frisbee as well as a pool diving ring. B5 was the first to finally get his ring around Saturn, and moved on to aiming for Uranus while B5 worked on Saturn for a while longer.

We watched a video about how astronauts brush their teeth (B7 was so relieved to hear that the water sticks to the toothbrush - he had some concerns!), then I let the kids explore the Night Sky app on my phone for a few minutes while I got the supplies out for the next activity. They thought that was so cool - I’ll have to remember to take them out for some early evening star gazing in the winter when it starts getting dark before their bedtime!

We started our first constellation activity of the week by drawing with a white crayon on white paper - yep, you read that right! I told them to make dots all over the paper, and that these dots were going to be our stars. Then, we used watercolor paints to cover our paper, and the crayon dots showed through. In a stroke of luck, B7 had read a book the week before that had talked about wax resist painting on Ukranian easter eggs, so I brought that back up briefly to point out how it worked. The kids didn’t have as precise and defined “stars” as me, so after they finished painting their papers, we used mine to hunt for our own constellations (though G5 did find a seagull in hers!)

Our final activity of Wednesday was a follow-along art video to learn to draw an astronaut. We have really enjoyed this style of art activity ever since the schools switched to distance learning due to COVID-19 and B7’s art teacher did his lessons in this style.

Once we finished, the kids begged to get the Oobleck back out. We had let it try up overnight, so I gave it to them with a pitcher of water so they could have control over the texture for themselves, which they really enjoyed. This came back out every day of the week (keeping our hands nice and blue!) They even asked to keep it at the end of the week, but I said we would make them one that didn’t have any dye inside to explore int he future.