We Went Stargazing!

 It was a good school week.

It was also a good food week.  (Honestly, most of our weeks are good food weeks, but I'm learning some new skills, so I have a sense of accomplishment and adventure that is new.)

We're part of the country that has been frozen solid.

So on Monday, the kids and I froze bubbles.  

It was harder to do than the beautiful blogs with their beautiful photographs indicate.

But it was awesome!

It was something like -4° outside, so I don't think we even lasted half an hour with the bubbles, but we came in happy and cold.  We read a little bit about the science of bubbles and freezing, then we settled into regular academics like math and spelling and history.

I doubled up our moon studies in the plan above with both a craft and an Oreo moon phase diagram,but the craft (listed as "easy" in the book) turned out to be too complicated and fiddly for my particular crew.

Hurrah for doubling up!  I chucked the craft, did the Oreo activity with the kids, read about the moon, and had a perfectly fine school day.

I prompted the kids to study the picture of our art piece up close.

Ladybug did it!  She got out her jeweler's loupe and examined the texture of Van Gogh's work up close and personal.

Then!

The skies cleared up for the first time in the month.  It was -11°, but church activities were canceled, Sir Walter Scott was home, the moon was not quite at the first quarter, it hadn't snowed in a few days so the roads were clear, and it seemed like a good time to head out into the country for some stargazing.

Sir Walter Scott and I examined the light pollution map and figured we could get to a reasonably dark area within an hour.

We bundled up so much!!!

And we saw stars as the children had never seen stars before.

Little Princess helped us identify everything we were looking at with her astronomy app.

We saw Saturn, Cassiopeia, Orion (not just his belt), Perseus, Auriga, the Pleiades, Arcturus, and a whole bunch of other things including a couple of satellites.

I knew the pictures wouldn't come out, but I took them anyway as memories.

We had a couple of cows for company because we literally just stopped on a country road by a pasture access gate.

At one point the 6 younger kids piled onto a sleeping bag on the ground and started the laughing game.   I couldn't keep from laughing as their fake laughter turned real.

On the way there and back, we started listening to an audio recording of The Long Winter.  We've been listening to it on all of our other drives this week, and we'll continue to do so until we're done.  

We've been listening to The Incorrigibles series for the second time--we've completed books 1-3--but I was ready for a break, and this is fitting the bill during this cold spell we've been having.

When we got home, Brother said sadly, "Our sky here at home is so empty.  I wish we could turn off all the lights around, so we could see the stars better all of the time."

Me, too, Brother.  Me, too.

With a sudden uptick in the temperature, I planned our hike for Wednesday.

The sun shone brightly.

The sky was a perfect blue.

The snow was still thick.

Twenty-five degrees felt practically balmy.

We saw these interesting tracks--the little ones with the line where a tail dragged.  We spent several minutes researching what tracks they could be, and we've decided they most likely belong to a white-footed mouse.  It's quite possible they belong to another kind of mouse or rodent, but that's the best we could conclude given our resources.

We found so many different kinds of tracks!  And the coolest part is that in some places, we were able to read them well enough to tell a bit of a story.

Like the tracks we couldn't understand until Ladybug said they might be bird tracks instead of mammal.  Suddenly, it was obvious that a bird had been hopping about, flew for a few feet, then landed and hopped in the snow again.

By the river, we could see coyote tracks leading to the water, see where it stopped for a drink, and then how it turned and continued its journey.

Some of the icicles in the cave were over 5 feet long.  We talked a lot about the drip patterns and what must have made the ice freeze the way it did.  We saw some crazy formations!

These two happily sat by a hole in the ice, making it bigger with a stick, tossing handfuls of snow into the water to watch it melt, and talking about life in general.

Every kid happily filled out a nature journal page when we got home, too.

We had dance on Thursday, and it was as all-consuming as it usually is.

I gave Ladybug the job of boiling the eggs this week.  (The rest of the kids were disappointed it was a one-person job.)  

I sat on the couch and let Ladybug work in the kitchen by herself.  I coached her a little bit, but she successfully boiled a batch of 20 eggs that we turned into our lunch that day.

Little Princess made all of the fresh rolls that we ate with the eggs.

On Friday, Baymax finished Teaching Textbooks Math 3!

He's excited (sort of) to start Math 4 on Monday.

We studied comets together, and I simplified our comet craft to a more open-ended art activity.  The kids were delighted to experiment with chalk pastels, and they made some beautiful comets.  

Then they extended the work to pictures of galaxies, star clusters, black holes (an interpretation), planets, and a nebula.

Over the course of the week, we read many chapters of George's Secret Key to the Universe.

We completed The Little White Horse and began Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of NIMH.

We didn't have The Munchkin or Sugar Bear for most of the week because they got to stay home with Mommy!

The teens and I reviewed some irregular verb forms and "the friendly letter" in grammar.  We read about Henry VIII and a bunch of people in his world (wives, daughters, other relatives) in history.  

On their own, they worked on mathematics, science, literature, and whatever else they've got going on about which I can't remember details. :)

Something I deeply appreciate about Little Princess is how she includes her siblings in her cooking projects.  She is probably teaching them more than I am!

I got to meet our FSP via telehealth, and we had a good conversation.  We'll be meeting twice a month, and I think that's just right.

We've got a ton of appointments in the week ahead.  

And the weather is returning to the mid-thirties and low-forties, which is more usual for us.

But it's going to rain as all of the snow melts, so our world is going to be very, very soggy.

I'm off to see what our best bet for a hike is going to be!