Monday 5 November 2012

Mister Golden Sun

Oh, how it takes extra energy when my husband goes out of town for work.  I arrived home from errands at 5:00 and wondered what would be for supper, and was welcomed to the phone ringing and toddler frantic to be the one doing the talking.  Fortunately, all is well now...the children are content to play while supper cooks, and I have a few spare seconds to write this post.

We're continuing on with our solar system theme this week.  Last week we had an overall glimpse of the solar system.  For the next couple of weeks, we're diving into one planet at a time.  We will be mixing facts about the celestial bodies with ancient mythology to make for some interesting storytelling.  We'll also be working on a felted solar system swag that the children will be able to hang in their doorways - our version of the classic solar system mobile.  Today, the focus of our attention was the Sun.

We started off with a poem about the Sun from, you guessed it, The Waldorf Book of Poetry.  Then we read a page from The Planet Gods, which introduces both myths and facts about the solar system, with really amazing illustrations.  We gathered Sun facts from One Million Things:  Space.  Lastly, we read Apollo, which shared several stories about this Greek (and later turned Roman) deity.

Lastly, we wet-felted the first of our solar system orbs.  Large, yellow, and fluffy, all three children were happy to dip their wool into the soapy warm water and roll it between their hands until it formed a ball.  Later, we noticed that the yellow fluff just barely visible on our felt balls could resemble the Sun's atmosphere - it's corona.  There were also a few bits of debris in the wool that became sun spots.  We had fun with this one.  Once the balls are dry, we'll add just a hint of orange to give our suns "granulation" - what makes the suns surface look like an orange peel and is caused by hot gases rushing from the core to the surface - by needle felting some orange over top.


And what would you know - as we finished up our felt balls, the real sun actually popped its head out from behind those grey clouds and bathed our kitchen in light!  Apollo must have known we were talking about him!

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