Having a Ball

We are having a ball with the weekly Unplugged projects, which is good since this week's inspiration was BALL.

We did not have school on Friday, and the girls woke me up bright and early, all excited to make their Solar System Mobile. Uggg - I was so looking forward to sleeping in! Sigh.

So, after trying to feed them breakfast (the did not want anything) and trying to convince them to get dressed (they did not want to waste time dressing) I was finally able to convince them that I need coffee before I could help them at all. So they found some of the many solar system and space books we have and the began looking through them for inspiration on creating our planets.



We decided that we should sketch out the planets for size, and assign specific planets to each of us so that we all knew which planets we were making, and thus what size ball to create.

After an hour or so of drawing and talking about the planets - really, they spent a long time planing their project out - they asked for a snack. I was surprised they made it that long, because Lauren wakes up famished and cranky. Today she was just too excited to be cranky

I am impressed with Annika's desire to write in her project journal. She has made sure that we "document" our thought process each time we undertake a project lately. And this time she labeled the planets (her spelling and penmanship is questionable, but her interest is spot on!) and she also drew some distinguishing features for the planets that she knows.

I love doing these projects with the girls; I actually do the project that they are doing , but I let them take the lead and decide what they are going to do, and how they will do it. They are actually figuring out how to learn through exploration, and how to document these new thoughts and observations. While this is exactly the outcome I want and the exact ideal learning environment I would love to have for them always, I never expected these project journals to be such a simple and complete method of achieving this. And, big bonus, they kids LOVE the projects and the documenting!

We did not have time to paint the giant glue-balls of newspaper, but hopefully some time soon we will finish the project. However, if you ask me, the real benefit to the whole project was the first hour or so. But I do want them to have a finished object to look at and be proud of their work.