The Boys Get Wet

I don't talk too much about Lachlann in this blog because, to be honest, I'm not really doing much "homeschooling" with him. Not that I'm doing any school-y academic work with Colwyn, but I do make more of an effort to plan fun learning activities for him, where as with Lachlann, I just play. He is, after all, only 18 months old.

One of the "enrichment" things that I do with Lachlann (and Colwyn), though, is water play. In the summer, water play is easy.. but in the winter, it requires a bit more work. At least once a week, I lay a few towels on the kitchen floor and set out several big bowls of water and as many interesting utensils as I can spare. The boys have tons of fun with this activity. Just so ya know, kids that engage in frequent water and sand play are more likely to have better language skills.



In other water-related news.. we took a 45 minute walk today down near Norwood Pond. I say near because we never actually made it there.. turns out it's a much longer walk when you have two kids and it's icy. The weather was really nice, though, close to 50 degrees, so we went for it. The kids had a really good time, despite getting wet, as did Maddy, who we actually let off leash for a bit. We didn't see much in the way of critters, but we did hear a woodpecker. We talked a bit about what woodpeckers do, and when we got home, looked up a picture on the Internet.





So Colwyn has resumed his interest in space. I finally got him to glue down the planets, sun, and appropriate labels. He really likes pointing to planets and either telling me which ones they are or asking me to identify them. I don't have a picture, because unfortunately, I realized that two planets are painted the wrong color. Apparently, a lot of the pictures you see in the paper or on websites are artificially colored. So, I found the right colors, and as soon as I feel like bringing out the paints, I'll explain it to Colwyn and we'll fix them. I figure it'll be a good lesson in correcting your mistakes, and in how to research things. I may "stage" looking up the real colors online.

But we have done a few other cool things. The most recent was when we dropped objects into a container full of baking soda to see how moon craters are made. We did this after watching a Naked Science episode about the moon. Colwyn really liked this activity. Here he is dropping an "asteroid" onto the "moon":



And here he is shaking the container to clear the craters:



Right now Doug is reading Zoom! Zoom! Zoom! I'm Off to the Moon! by Dan Yaccarino. I've got some other recommendations for good books about space, so I'll try looking for those at our next library trip.

And just for the fun of it, here's a quick picture of the boys dressing up in Doug's t-shirts. Colwyn wore his all day, and insisted that I call him Dad. It was kind of weird saying, "Here Dad, let me wipe your bum" and various other things I would never say to Doug. :)