WOL - February Fun

I'm glad I'm writing this post because I can see that we did actually have fun last month. We also had two bouts of stomach flu plus a round of bad colds which is a lot in just 28 days. No wonder the month is a bit of a blur.

I know I checked "Night in the Country" out from the library to pre-read it earlier this year but when I went to get it this month it wasn't there so I substituted Owl Moon. We'd already read it but we love it and it worked just fine. We made some Zucchini moons and Lucy was quite proud to be able to cut the zuichinni all by herself and help me stir them on the stove. She even took a couple bites before proclaimed them "no so very good." I have to agree with her - I don't really like Zucchini much :-)

This wasn't planned but we ended up listening to some owl sounds and watching a couple youtube clips with owls. And then while Craig was out with the kids in the backyard, they stumbled upon what we believe was an owl pellet! This was neat for the lesson but makes me a bit worried about the chicks.

We read Vincenti's colors and painted still lifes which I talked about here. Then she sewed her own starry sky with felt and embroider floss. She loved it so much she insisted we hang it up with her other hoops in her room.

We also made Starry Night playdough. I'd suggest going for blue over black because black food coloring seems to make more of a poopy dark green color playdough. But the sequins made it fun. I also made some yellow so Lucy could make stars.

I love this one of Jonah. He's working so hard to get that cookie cutter to do what he wants.  

We finally got around to checking out our local science museum and planetarium and even decided to be brave and take the kids to a show. It was called "The Little Star that Could" and it was really cute. They said it was for kids 5+ but most of the kids there were probably around Lucy's age and they had mats for us to lay down on so a little bit of wiggling was fine. I was able to lay down with Jonah for about half the show before he got antsy but it was easy enough to walk around the back of the dark room with him. Lucy learned a lot and I did too!

The rest of the science museum was really geared for older kids but we had fun at a few places. 

Yes, I see our mistake but when you have two helpers sometimes that happens :-)

Holograms and toddlers are fun to watch together. 

We went out star gazing a couple nights. I had read several relevant sections from the Handbook of Nature Study before hand. I started so I would be able to show them to Lucy but I'll admit that I really got into it and Craig and I had fun with some star gazing apps on our tablet. I made a sketch in my nature notebook of the ones we found so I can see how the positions change in a few months. 

I made some of the ones we had found on construction paper (marked with pencil). It was just dark enough that Lucy could find them and fill them in. I had planned on using our gold dot markers but she got some glitter glue for Valentine's day so we used that. It worked really well. The big dipper and Orion she recognized right away but the others needed to be filled in with the blue before she understood what they were supposed to be. I personally still think Cassiopia is a bit of a stretch. 

Then we moved on from the sky to Australia with Possum Magic. We made invisible pictures but drawing with white oil pastels and then painting over them. The first one was rough. Lucy was very skeptical about the whole process and kept getting upset and didn't want to use white. I finally shower her what happened when she put watercolor on top of it and suddenly it was the best art project ever! I think she did five or six pages. 

We also made lamingtons. These were quite tasty but my helpers were a little overly helpful. They were supposed to wait for me to completely coat the cake in chocolate before sprinkling the coconut on top but as you can see, that didn't quite happen. Waiting is hard when you are under 4. They still tasted really good though.