7 - 13 June (week 23) Animal-y themed and eclipse

 This week we :

Baked some cookies together

 Read and chatted about some lego explorer magazines about insects and polar animals 

We looked up how to make an eclipse viewer. We decided on a type that projected the sun into a cereal box so we could see it.

On the day of the partial eclipse it was cloudy but luckily there were enough breaks in the clouds that we did get to see the chunk taken out of the sun! Some friends also made an eclipse viewer slightly differently so we got to see theirs as well.

 We looked up info about the eclipse to find out where we would have to be for the moon to completely cover the sun. We found out that even in the Arctic, where the moon would be completely in line with the sun, it wouldn't have covered the whole sun because the moon was too far from the Earth at this time. That led us to talk about perspective and how things seem larger when they are closer and can cover up more of something further away.

We played on Ring Fit Adventure - a new exercise game we got - a couple of times, and played at the playground as well as went for a couple of walks and a bike ride.

We saw some ants and aphids on some of our plants in the garden. We wondered what the ants were doing as they seemed to be hanging around by the aphids but not eating them. We found out about how ants farm aphids for their honeydew! We don't want the aphids to take all the goodness from our plants so we removed a lot of them to protect the plant. 

Vin was stuck trying to find something on a game he was playing so we looked it up to find out and then he wrote it down to remember it. 

We visited Kent Life which is a farm nearby. We saw owls, meerkats, saw growing hops and saw in the oast house , read some info about coopers who made barrels and other containers and talked about how some surnames we use today often used to be a job in that persons distant family like cooper and baker , fed the alpacas and goats, petted the goats and sheep, rode the tractor . Looked up what alpacas eat and what’s in the pellets they give them. 

And of course we read books and played lego and watched more Octonauts! 

Library books this week same as last week.