We started off Thursday by heading to a spot down the street that I was reasonably confident would stay sunny throughout the day. We traced our shadows around 10, 11, 12, and then later in the afternoon around 3 to watch how they moved and changed throughout the day! B7 had a previous understanding of this and was fantastic at explaining to his sisters what would happen and why, which was pretty cool. As we worked on this, we talked a bit about how sundials work to tell time.

When we returned home, I asked to collect their chosen stuffed animals (I had asked them each to bring one to camp with them), and led them to a pile of all the recycling I’ve been hoarding for the last week or so: boxes, fruit clamshells, bottlecaps, TP tubes, I think there was even a sport drink tablet container in there! Their task: to create a spaceship for their animal astronaut. Their supplies: Any recycling they could find, plus a roll of masking tape apiece. I had brought along my boxcutter and told them that anywhere they wanted the cardboard cut, they could draw a line and I would cut it for them, but beyond that, they were on their own! I was amazed at their creativity. G2 wanted lots of circle-ish shaped cut out, which she glued together in a stack to make a “chair” for her astro-bunnies. G5 went with a basic rectangular prism box design, but spent a lot of time taping on lids and other small objects for buttons and drawing clocks and other gauges. B7 had a “go big or go home” attitude about it - he immediately started lining up boxes and cutting out the sides to make one long inside chamber, then took a page out of G5’s book to add in dials and buttons. I was so impressed by all three of them!

We watched a quick video on how astronauts exercise in space, and spoke for a few moments about why that is important. This led us to talking about long durations in space, which in turn was a perfect lead-up to start talking about Mars! I showed them some pictures taken by rovers of the martian landscape. Then, we got to work on a new art project: a Marsscape. To start with, I had them sketch out a horison line, and then paint in their sky. We had to let that part dry, and ended up returning to this activity later in the afternoon to finish up. We re-drew our horizons, then sketched out a few foreground details like rocks, small hills, and (my favourite part) tracks from the rover as though we were taking a picture of where we had been. Then, we used a paint brush to put glue only exactly where we wanted it, and started mixing up colored sand to create a whole range of hues across the red/orange part of the colour wheel! It was a blast!

Our last activity of the morning was a meteoroid toss. I had orginally planned on rolling out our distance scale solar system again, but it was too windy, so instead, we used a few boxed that hadn’t been turned into rocketships and labelled them with celestial bodies - the kids chose Jupiter for the biggest, Saturn for the medium-sized one, and Moon for the smallest. They had a bit of fun throwing our foil ball meteoroids around, and while we had a brief chat about the difference between meteor, meteoroid, and meteorite, I don’t expect those differences to stick!