Don't Rain on My Parade

So I planned to have summer vacation, I really did. But when I told Jacob summer vacation was starting he was not impressed. "But I like math and I want to learn about thunderstorms." And then he proceeded to detail the way he forsaw learning about thunderstorms. So here we are, in August, starting a new unit study on STORMS. We began by making rain clouds. This activity shows that when clouds get too heavy with water, they rain....

It's a shaving cream cloud! We filled the glasses with water and then added the cloud. We put food colouring on top and it makes its way through the cloud and rains! So cool!

Then, of course, we made purple and red rain too!

This was so much fun we actually used up all of Jeff's shaving cream.

Flowers For Mom

Here's a fun experiment!

We picked these flowers/weeds in the backyard, they are kind of like Queen Anne's lace. We left them to sit overnight...

You can really see the flowers turn blue! 

Aren't they pretty?

Ontario - Yours To Discover

So, obviously, the CN Tower is the tallest building in Canada. That's cool, I think, and worth learning about! But do you think I could find any CN Tower kids' crafts on the internet? Nope. I found two colouring pages. Lame. Anyways....

I printed out an outline of the CN Tower at 800% so it would be quite tall. After looking at some real pictures (including some oldies of me and Jeff) I gave them the pieces and had them build it like a puzzle. Then (not to scale, though my math brain really really wanted me to figure out how big the houses truly should be) we pasted on the city buildings. Daniel drew the Skydome. And of course it was stormy and the poor CN Tower is getting hit by lightning... many times. They loved this fact about it. And also that there is a spinning restaurant they could eat lunch in. 

And just for kicks... I took a picture of a picture that was taken before I owned a digital camera. 2001.

Inukshuks - Rock People

So in my research somewhere I read that "an inukshuk is essentially a pile of rocks shaped like a human being." But they are really so much more! They can represent welcome or warning and even tell you where the good caribou hunting is at. They represent the human spirit. I think they are beautiful. I wanted so much to make some with the boys, but I just couldn't see trying to glue rocks together going well. So after reading about them and looking at MANY pictures we did this:

They kept going after this picture and then gave all of them colourful block hats. Isn't it neat how each inukshuk is unique and yet you can still tell it is supposed to be a person?

I sacrificed a few blocks to create stamps. I simply used double sided scotch tape and scraps of felt to do this. Once dried, I peeled the felt off and tossed the blocks back in the box, a little painted but still usable. The boys used their block Inukshuks as inspiration to do these paintings:

Ok, I love these so much I put them up in our hallway. When the paint was dry I carefully outlined the Inukshuks so they would stand out better against the background. A truly fun project.