Hold on to your hats, it's windy on the wagon!

A berry popsicle for a glamorous girl.

When else can you get this messy?!?

Happy birthday, Lisa, we had fun picking strawberries with you!

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.

Sun-sensitive paper.

Carolyn's sun-print, pre-exposure.

In the water bath!

Anna did buttons...and a lizard.

Before it hits the water - a negative!

Poke, poke, poke.

What can I say? It looked like fun!

They get bluer as they dry.

Lots of fun, and they worked well despite it being a little overcast!

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?)

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!

This morning we headed outside to make some Chalk People:

First, we traced each other's shadows with chalk...

...then we colored ourselves in...

Yes, the yellow shirt is now covered in chalk.

Anna thought it was hilarious that she was about the same size as my chalk shadow.

But wait, there’s more! We made some sunshine decorations!

Paper plate, clothespins, paint, brushes & googly eyes.

First paint half a paper plate yellow.

Such a pretty yellow!

There are a lot of crevices in these plates!

Then paint some clothespins yellow.

This is messy. Unless you get your mom to hold it for you.

When they’re dry, stick on some googly eyes…

Is there anything googly eyes can't make cuter?

…draw a mouth…

Nothin' fancy, just a sharpie.

…and add the clothespin rays!

Cutest. Sunshine. Ever.

Smile for the camera!

I hope they always remember these little golden moments of play together...

Headed off to her last day!

…and a third grader came home!

The bus driver loaded them up with popsicles!

Hooray for summer vacation!