Learning by Heart – I See the Moon

“The mother’s heart is the child’s schoolroom”
– Henry Ward Beecher

{M is 4 1/2 years old}

      M is in love with the moon.

It all began with If You Decide To Go To The Moon , by Faith McNulty: I heard about this book from Natalie over at Mouse Grows, Mouse Learns, and thought M would like it.  Well, he did.  He couldn’t get enough of it and was instantly fascinated with outer space in general, and the moon in particular.  We have previously read books about outer space and the moon, but none of them sparked his interest as well as this one.

So we began a very simple little moon unit. 

We watched the launch of the space shuttle Discovery in February (yes, this is a pretty late post) live on the laptop:It was thrilling, to say the least.  He talked about it for days afterward.  I couldn’t quite get him to understand that they weren’t going to the moon, but oh well. :)  He loved learning about how everything is weightless in space and how the astronauts can float around inside of the space shuttle.  He wanted to get into the nitty-gritty details of how they live in it, especially how they go to the bathroom.  sigh.  It’s all part of learning, right? ;)

We played games with some beautiful space flashcards I picked up from Target over a year ago.I was smart enough to get two sets at the time, although I wasn’t smart enough to think of a way to use them.  But once M’s interest in all things outer space was in high gear, I remembered this post of Ticia’s, where she created a game for her kids using these same flashcards.  Click on the link to her post to get the specific details.  This was fun and as soon as one of us had a card covered we flipped it over and read all of the interesting information on the back.  I think it would’ve gone a bit more quickly if we’d had more than just 2 players though, or if I had separated the flashcards into smaller groups.

We learned a bit about the phases of the moon too. 

We watched this video:

  

We looked at this page of the Starchild website a bit:The website is part of NASA, and has tons of interesting things for children to learn about.  I highly recommend taking a look!  We only went over the moon phases web page, but I think we’ll be back to learn more!

I made some moon phases Montessori-style 3-part cards.  I couldn’t find exactly what I wanted online (for free anyway), so I used a public domain photo of the moon, and edited it to show the various phases:  

We had an art project waiting for us as M matched up these cards and labels, and I felt like he was hurrying through it to get to something more fun.  However, he has since talked about the “gibbous” moon on his own, so I guess some of it stuck! :)

You can download and print the Moon Phases 3-Part Cards here:

M had fun making a little outerspace artwork.  We used black paper, green and blue chalk dipped in water, aluminum foil, scissors, sequins, silver glitter glue, and two circle-shaped lids:
I showed M how to hold a lid and draw around it at the same time in order to draw a circle.  He cut one circle from foil for the moon, and one was drawn onto the black paper with chalk.  He drew some areas of land on his “earth circle” and then colored it in with wet chalk (wet chalk on black paper is fun, and a good art project all on its own).

He drew a face on his moon, then sparkled up the the rest of outer space with some sequin and glitter glue stars: 

On a trip to visit my parents, we were lucky enough to find this amazing book in a box my mom wanted me to look through:I’m not sure if or where it can be found, but it is truly amazing. :)  It is filled with facts, and after reading it, you can unfold the pages:Open it up:And you have a 4-foot long space shuttle model!  M was in space shuttle heaven. :)  There’s a lot of great details, like a satellite in the cargo area:And a pull-out section showing the control panels and the area the astronauts live in:(sorry that picture didn’t turn out so well!)

There were several other moon-related books we read; here are M’s favorites…

The Moon, by Seymour Simon: This is long, but packed with information.  M wanted to read this one several times a day for two weeks straight.

I Took the Moon for a Walk, by Carolyn Curtis and Alison Jay:

Moondance, by Frank Asch:

Happy Birthday, Moon, by Frank Asch:

  (M loves all the Moonbear books by Asch!)

The Berenstain Bears on the Moon, by Jan and Stan Berenstain:

I’m linking this post up to Preschool Corner, and Weekly Wrap-Up, as well as Science Sunday!  Be sure to check them all out!

Have a beautiful day! :)

 

Art Time - Painting with Melted Crayons

We did this little art project a couple of days before St. Patrick’s Day; I liked the idea of using crayons to paint a rainbow, and it turned out better than I imagined.  M loved this and we’ll definitely do it again sometime soon.   I first saw the idea in a MaryAnn Kohl book (either Scribble Art or Preschool Art) about two years ago, but have since seen it around the blogosphere a couple of times too.

Using melted crayons to paint a bouquet of flowers would make a wonderful Mother’s Day gift, or any spring-time sort of artwork!

We began with a bucket full of M’s “naked” (no paper) crayons.  He loves removing the paper and sharpening crayons, so this step was already done.  Seriously, if you need an activity for a rainy day, have your child peel paper off of crayons and then sharpen them with a crayon sharpener.  M could do this all day!  

Next we chose several crayons in various shades of red, orange, yellow, green, blue, and purple.  We broke them up (lots of fun!) and placed them by color into an old muffin tin, lined with paper cups:

I placed the muffin tin in a 400 (Fahrenheit) degree oven.  It took about 10 minutes for the crayons to completely melt.  In the meantime I boiled some water and poured it into a cake pan.  Once the crayons were melted I set the muffin tin into the cake pan too.  The hot water was there to keep the crayons melted, as they tend to harden pretty quickly.  If you have a warming tray you could use that instead.  I really need a warming tray!  :)

I had pre-drawn our design and M used q-tips to paint it with the melted crayons:

    

The crayon went on very thick and created an incredible texture.  I just loved it! 

M’s finished shamrock and rainbow:This looks so much more amazing in real life. :)

It was so much fun, we just had to make something else, so a quick heart was drawn and painted (and Mama got in on the action this time!):

 

Linking to:

Have a beautiful day! :)

How Lent Went

:)  1. Artwork

Ah, it feels good to be back blogging. :) 

Before I forget everything we did while observing Lent this year, I want to write a few posts about it.  So today and the next couple of days may not bear much relevant reading, but it will give me something to link back to next Lent, heh.  ;)

First, I’m going to share the Lent-specific arts and crafts we worked on.  We have a door that goes from our kitchen into our breezeway and is made up of glass panes.  I want to call it a French door, but I’m not sure that’s correct.  Anyway, you get the idea.

It is perfect for filling up with sun catcher-type artwork, which, as you know, is really overdone around here.  Although, as I sit here and look at my kitchen walls which are covered with the creations of a 4 year old, I’m realizing maybe we just overdo art, period.  Or maybe Mama has a problem with throwing some art away from time to time.

Or maybe we are just happy and don’t want to change a thing. :)  It won’t always be like this, right?!

Anyway, back to my kitchen door.  To celebrate Lent and a few special days within Lent we decided to create 7 pieces of art and arrange them on the glass panes of the door in the shape of a cross.

And, for fun, we experimented with a few new (for us) artsy ideas in the process. 

I started by cutting black frames for each section of the door, then brought one out on each special day, along with whatever other supplies were needed.  We looked through the calendar and chose 7 special days to create something for our door.

First, on Ash Wednesday (the first day of Lent), M made a purple cross pane.  The cross was made from construction paper, and sandwiched between two pieces of wax paper.  To make it pretty M sharpened some old crayons then used the shavings to decorate the empty areas, and I ironed it a bit to get them to melt:

  
This was our first attempt at this, and I like how it turned out, although I could have used a bit cooler iron, I think.

Next up was St. Patrick’s Day, March 17th.  We melted crayons and painted with them, which was a huge amount of fun!  The texture of the finished artwork is fabulous.  We made a shamrock with a rainbow stem, and talked about how St. Patrick used the shamrock to explain the Trinity.  We used some sketch pad paper for this one.  It is heavy enough to hold the melted crayon and still let the light through a bit.  I’ll be writing more about this fun activity in an upcoming post.       

M had so much fun painting this way that we decided to make a heart also, for the top section of our cross.  After painting it, I cut it out and taped it to a piece of wax paper:

And our window cross began to take shape:

 

For St. Joseph’s feast day (March 19th), and The Annunciation of the Lord (the angel Gabriel’s visit to Mary, celebrated on March 25th, 9 months before Christmas), we used small cut-out pictures from online or magazines, contact paper, and tissue paper…

St. Joseph:

I love how this simple activity looks so pretty and a lot like stained glass: 

For the Annunciation, we added in some pieces of aluminum foil around the picture of Mary and the angel, for a bit of bling:

 

The finished pieces made the horizontal cross piece:

For Palm Sunday I knew we should use a palm leaf in some way, but I wasn’t quite sure what to do.  M cut one of our palms into sections and we arranged it on a piece of contact paper.  M wasn’t interested in using tissue paper again, so I dug through my ribbon collection and found some beautiful sheer ribbon that looks gold on one side and red on the other.  We snipped it into pieces and placed them on the empty areas of the contact paper: 
Doesn’t it look nice?  However, once it was hanging in the window, the fact that it is very sheer ribbon meant that you could barely see the colors of it.  We took it down and lined the back with white tissue paper, which helped a bit; but, as you can see in the picture below, this one didn’t turn out as vivid as the other panes:I like the idea of using ribbon in this way, but next time we’ll find something a bit more solid or use a darker color behind it.

 

Last, but not least, was Holy Thursday.  We used a picture of the Last Supper printed from online, and some wax paper.  You could use parchment paper for this too, but I really thought the wax paper gave more of a pretty glow in the window. 

I intended to use our oil pastels, but could not find them – ack!  I love those things, so I hope they turn up soon.  We ended up using some Elmer “Slicks” which are very much like oil pastels.  They are a creamy sort of crayon, but a bit messier than pastels.  Window crayons would work too.  I used a gold paint pen to draw random lines on the wax paper, and M (who, I must say, learned to color within lines overnight it seems) used the Slicks to color each section:

Then we taped our picture of the Last Supper in the middle, framed it and hung it on the last pane of our cross:(I think this was my favorite of them all!)

 

Our window cross was finished just in time for Good Friday:

To finish up our Lenten artwork, we made a super easy Easter (or Paschal) candle.

This idea was straight from Catholic Icing’s Paschal Candle post.

Simply scratch your design into the candle with a toothpick, paint over it, then rub off the excess with a wet paper towel.  We didn’t have cloves, but M did want to add some star “jewels”.  We kept the design very simple – a cross with the year, and a shining sun on the back.  

We’ll leave our window cross and our Easter candle up for the entire season of Easter (it’s a 50-day feast!).  Our “door cross” is beautiful, and a really lovely reminder to take time to reflect on our faith; while our candle reminds us of the wonderful Light we have been given.

Have a beautiful day! :)