I’m playing catch-up today, after a really full (and kind of stressful) week. My first step is to get some laundry finished, then I can tackle the rest of the mess.
Weekend, with eclipse
My husband and I came into both free movie tickets and an offer to babysit, so we took advantage of it and went to see The Avengers. It was highly entertaining! And it was REALLY nice to get out. 🙂 We treated ourselves to food (including sushi — I tried octopus and tobiko) and it was SO GOOD.
Then! Then! Sunday night we got to see the annular eclipse!
I didn’t get solar viewing glasses from the planetarium soon enough; they were sold out by the time I could go get some. So instead we made a couple simple pinhole viewers out of some boxes, foil, and paper. Here we tested them out.
At 6:30 we could see a small sliver of the moon covering the sun (I didn’t get a picture of that), but then… THEN… some clouds moved in. For an HOUR. But they cleared up just in time for the BEST PART!
Here’s our pinhole viewing setup. One was a long box with a pinhole at one end and a paper at the other, and the other was a box lid with a pinhole in it, and a large box with a paper in the bottom. The long box was easy for one person to use at a time, and the lid-and-box setup was easier for more people to look at it. It worked great!
The eclipse itself made the light look really strange — yellower, like the sun was coming through a filter. I wish we could have gone down to southern Utah to see the full Ring of Fire effect, but what we got to see was pretty awesome all the same. 🙂
Summer is Coming, With Art Projects
This is the second-to-last week of school for the kids. I am trying to brainstorm some activities to do with the kids once they’re home all day.
My oldest son and I are going to put together an art show! We already have a theme: Words As Art. It will be a series integrating letters, numbers, words and full text into works of art. some will be comics-style, but we may also try some illuminated-manuscript-style work; I did illuminated letters with his class last week and he LOVED it. I’m going to make some ACEOs to go with it — I’ve already started on “A”. I’ll post more on this project as it develops.
And maybe — just maybe — if I involve my kids in my creation process, I can get more accomplished…! We’ll see how this goes.