Sarah's Journal

Using the template here, we made some sunshines to hang in our windows.

The materials: contact paper, template pieces, tissue paper & scissors.

I had pre-cut the circles and triangles out of heavy black construction paper.

Ready to fill in!

While I set up the templates on contact paper, I had the girls cut up the yellow and orange paper…unfortunately, Anna’s safety scissors don’t seem to cut things that thin!

She gave it a good try, though.

Luckily, Carolyn's scissors worked!

Just like last year, Anna goes with the “drop a pile on the template” method…

Well, she started out with one piece at a time.

And then Anna did this!

…and Carolyn prefers the one-piece-at-a-time method.

Carefully placing each piece of paper.

Very neatly filling it in!

We’ll have sunshine every day, even if it’s cloudy!

Carolyn's sunshine.

Anna's sunshine.

Question: What happens when you don’t wear sunblock in the pool?

The materials: beads, sunblock, empty cups & water.

Experiment: Coat sun-sensitive beads in sunblock, put some in water and some without water in the sun. Also put un-coated beads in water and without to see which change fastest.

The results.

Observations: The beads all changed color very quickly. The slowest to change were the ones with sunblock not in water. The sunblock beads in water changed nearly as fast as the ones without sunblock.

Conclusion: Either our sunblock is terrible, or the beads are too smooth to let it stick!

(The other possibility is that our sunblock is not designed to block the UV rays that the beads are sensitive to. Either way, the experiment did not have the startling results we were all expecting.)

However, sun-sensitive beads are fun for other reasons:

Bracelets inside...

...and outside!

Also, these are “SolarActive” brand beads.  I also purchased some Darice UV beads in two sizes, to see what the differences between the brands were:

The three different kinds of UV beads I found.

What they look like after being in sunlight.

Aside from colors, the Darice brand beads took a looooong time to change to full color.  (Maybe we should re-do our experiment with them?)

Today wasn’t quite so hands on for the girls, unfortunately.  I bought a solar panel kit on sale, despite the mixed reviews, figuring if it didn’t work well we could still find something fun to do with the bits.

What came in the box.

The box says 8+, but the pieces are *tiny*. It’s hard to wire things up, so I did all of the assembly while the kids looked on.

All the pieces ready to build.

We built a puppy:

The puppy "wags" its tail.

We built a car (this was by far one of the most fun – it zooooomed across the deck!)

Quarter thrown in for scale. Tiny!

We built an air boat. This pretty much didn’t do anything besides look pretty.

We didn't try it in water, we were afraid it would sink!

We built an airplane. At this point the sun went behind the clouds for a bit. So we tried a flashlight. The mini mag light did not make the panel work. But…the giant one did. A little.

Mini mag-lite...no. Giant mag-lite...eh...

...but it works much better in the sun!

We built a windmill:

A solar powered windmill. Er...why?

Finally, we built a rotating airplane. This was another fun one to watch!

It was like a mini amusement park ride!

We definitely got our money’s worth out of this kit, and I’m sure we’ll dig it out later this summer too!