For the month before the solar eclipse, the kids and I completed an intensive science unit on the sun and the solar eclipse, and it was awesome! Even though I LOVED astronomy as a kid, I'd been having trouble interesting the kids in the study (they are very much attached to the life sciences...), but this event turned out to be the perfect incentive to interest them, and they picked up a lot more than we'd started out intending to.
We used the NASA Eclipse Activity Guide as a spine--I used their main science activity and instructor's information for each lesson, but I added readings from library books, videos from YouTube, and arts and crafts activities for the little kid. I had to buy a few special supplies, such as our first spectroscope and a digital outdoor thermometer, but most of the required materials were readily available.
We completed most of the units in the order suggested by the Eclipse Activity Guide, or at least we intended to... the sun has its own agenda, so it was actually a Saturday when we did some of this particular unit on Solar Power; it had been overcast for most of the week, so when the sun rose bright and shining that day, I was not going to waste its power!
The activity that goes with this lesson in the NASA Eclipse Activity Guide is making and using a solar oven. The kids actually did this for a couple of days, re-engineering their first efforts when they didn't get great results with their first solar ovens. The basic model that the activity guide instructs them to build is a not incredibly efficient compilation of pizza box, aluminum foil, and plastic wrap:
These didn't really heat up the quesadillas and s'mores well, so the next day the kids reworked them with some stash mirrors (managing to break fully half of them, so I guess that's some more junk out of my storage space!). The second versions worked a little better, but if I had this unit to do again, I'd take the time to pull up some hardcore solar oven plans, get out the woodworking tools, and make a "real" solar oven with the kids, one that we could use over and over again to ACTUALLY cook our food...
Oh, well. I'm sure the subject will come up again some other time!
To make this study more suitable for the older kid, I added selections from Khan Academy to her requirements, wherever they applied. For this solar power unit, she also completed the Energy lab, which covers solar power and other energy sources, with an emphasis on sustainability.
To make the study more suitable for the younger kid, I added hands-on activities to her requirements, although they were tempting enough that the older kid often joined in. And when we made sun prints for this unit, the whole family joined in!
We are absolutely going to put building blocks on sun print paper again for math one day--I can't believe that I didn't get a good photo of the finished print, but the dark print where the bottom of the block sat, plus the lighter print made from its shadow, formed a beautiful and realistic-looking cube on the sun print paper. It was astonishing.
If we'd completed this study over a longer period of time, it would have been interesting to try to arrange a field trip to a solar park, or a lecture from a member of one of our local non-profits that try to encourage people to use solar power. We could have made a more elaborate solar oven, and experimented with sun printing onto fabric. The kids could have measured our house's energy expenditure, and done some problem-solving to reduce our usage. I could have bought them some solar panel kits and let them make themselves some solar-powered toys and gizmos.
But for our brief look, we now know about solar power, solar panels, and some uses for solar energy. And now I know how a solar panel works!
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In our History of Fashion study so far, Syd and I have:
worked with leather, embellished shells, and woven on a loom in Prehistory.
And now it's time to travel to Ancient Egypt!
Our spine for this study is The Complete Book of Fashion History, which is already well-thumbed by everyone in the family. For this unit, Syd and I re-read the pages for Ancient Egypt, and while there are loads of cross-curricular activities that you could do here--you could use the Story of the World chapters and activity book resources for Ancient Egypt, read biographies of Cleopatra and Nefertiti, study mummification, make a pharoah's costume or models of their elaborate jewelry--we've actually spent a LOT of time on Ancient Egypt over the years, so I zoomed in on the one thing that we haven't played around with yet: their eye makeup.
Eye makeup was a big deal for the Ancient Egyptians, and not just for cosmetic reasons. Just like football players do now, putting on dark eyeliner reduced glare on the eyes of the Ancient Egyptians in the bright sunlight, and the fact that the eye makeup contained lead, while it was terrible for their long-term health, did protect them from loads of eye diseases and infections.
Why would Ancient Egyptians get so many eye infections, you ask? It's because of all that freaking sand! It got everywhere, including in their eyes and into all of their food. Ancient Egyptians also had terrible teeth, because they ate so much sand that got into their meals that it wore down the enamel on their teeth.
Syd and I watched this video that shows images of Ancient Egyptian artwork, focusing on their eyes to provide the evidence that yes, indeed, dark eye makeup was a thing (at least on the artwork!)--
--and then we watched this video of a makeup artist recreating the look on her own eyes:
And then Syd tried it for herself!
Eyes open.
Eyes closed!
This was a fun activity for Syd, and inspired a whole week's worth of makeup play. It has never occurred to me for a single moment to ever want to put on even a smidge of makeup, but honestly, looking at Syd sitting across the table from me at 10 in the morning, sulking over finding the percent of difference between two numbers... I think she's wearing a little makeup right now, actually.
Here are some other ways that we've studied Ancient Egypt over the years:
Are you guys still getting over the total eclipse, too? Is it just me?
Y'all, I had been so pent up with excitement over the eclipse that by Sunday afternoon, I'm surprised that my partner didn't just drug me like a dog about to go on a plane trip. Studying the eclipse intensely with the kids for a month just got me even more worked up--I've been revved up about this eclipse for a year. My partner got us our hotel room 50 minutes from Carbondale, Illinois, Eclipse Capital, almost a year ago. Heck, I have had our eclipse glasses since MARCH!
Plan A was to leave our house on Sunday, stay the night at our hotel 50 minutes from Carbondale, then drive the next morning to Crab Orchard National Wildlife Preserve, just outside Carbondale's city limits, and watch the eclipse there. Plan B, if Crab Orchard was too busy or the traffic on the highway into Carbondale was too heavy, was to head a little further away and watch the eclipse from Cedar Lake, a reservoir more to the east. Plans C and D, if Carbondale was overcast, were to drive either towards Nashville or St. Joseph, Missouri, until we were free of cloud cover, and then find a suitable spot to watch.
To that end, we left the house on Sunday morning, just in case the traffic was already heavy. Since it wasn't, though, we ended up with plenty of time to spend the afternoon in Evansville, Indiana. We played at a local playground, found a Krispy Kreme so that the little kid can continue to live her dreams of eating ALL THE DOUGHNUTS, and then tag-teamed the kids around Angel Mounds, on account of I'm not used to planning vacations that include dogs and I didn't notice that dogs weren't allowed in the archaeological area until after we'd paid our admission:
Three Sisters Garden, with the addition of sunflowers
Here's a partial reconstruction of the wattle and daub stockade that surrounded the community.
This is what the inside of the stockade would have looked like, absent kids trying to look up the Native American's skirt.
This is Mound A, the Central Mound. The chief probably lived on the highest point, with some other community members living on the lower platform.
Even the lower platform is high, especially considering that it was built using basket-fulls of dirt, probably carried by hand.
Here's what the village might have looked like:
I'm always the most fascinated by the artifacts that are uncovered in a particular place. The architecture or other physical features are one thing, but these are items that regular people used as part of their everyday lives.
And look! The perfect complement to the weeks that the little kid and I spent studying prehistoric fashion as part of her History of Fashion study!
We had an early night at our hotel (why does my quest to order from independent pizza places wherever we stay mostly result in us eating a lot of highly mediocre pizza?), with me checking the radar hourly and fretting over all the traffic reports, and an even earlier morning. The good news is we passed the north-south biscuit and gravy line in our travels, so there was a crock pot of sausage gravy waiting for me, along with cold biscuits, microwaveable cheese "omelets," and bad coffee down in the hotel's breakfast buffet. Every single other person on the planet was also shoving breakfast into their faces and bolting out the door, too--we'd booked our hotel so early that it was a normal price, but the night before, on our way down to the pool, I'd heard the check-in clerk telling some guys that they were full, but she'd heard there were still a couple of rooms at the Fairfield Inn down the road that were going for 900 bucks apiece.
We were on the road by 6:30 am for a 50-minute drive, with little traffic to speak of, and were pulling into an only quarter-filled parking lot at the Crab Orchard National Wildlife Preserve an hour later. There was an air-conditioned visitor center across the lot, with working bathrooms and flushing toilets, and a lovely wooded hike that led to a lovely lake, but honestly, we spent most of the morning like this--
--and like this--
--yep, hanging out in the shade right off of the parking lot. The dog was content, we had plenty of books, and the car was right there whenever we wanted a snack or a drink--it was perfect! The parking lot filled within the hour, and then we were also treated to the sight of cars coming in and circling hopelessly before driving on--ahh, the satisfaction of sitting snugly in our spots in the face of the desperation of others!
Around mid-morning, rangers even came out and closed off the entrance to our lot entirely, so we could move our lawn chairs out of the shade and onto the asphalt, to better watch the show:
Even before you could really tell a difference in the day without your eclipse glasses on, things started to get weird. Just as we'd been told, the dappled light under our tree began showing us the crescent images of the sun:
Just as we'd been told, our shadows on the sidewalk had crisper, sharper edges:
This is because the light is coming from a smaller and smaller point, not diffused as it is when it comes from the entire body of the sun.
The crickets began to sing. The ambient light began to seem oddly dim, but not like sunset, when the light is leaving from the side; this was dimness like a room with the light bulb on low. It grew noticeably colder, as 99% of the photons normally striking us through sunlight were now being deflected. A breeze blew, as the air pressure became affected. We could see that it was visibly darker to our west. And still we watched:
And then there was this:
I was peeping at the sky when the last light left, so I saw the diamond ring with my naked eyes. I turned to make sure the children were watching, and saw the little kid still with her eclipse glasses on, so I ripped them off her face--I wasn't even thinking about damaged eyesight; I just wanted her to see that spectacular beam of light for the second that it was visible.
I'm not even going to try to describe the total eclipse, itself, to you. My photo doesn't really look like it, but I haven't seen any photos that do. I can't think of the words to say that would make it clear to you what it was like, if you didn't see it for yourself. Just... it was beautiful. It was the best thing that I've ever seen in my entire life, and yes, I know that I'm supposed to say that my first look at my children is the best thing that I've ever seen, but I was half out of my mind both times I gave birth, completely terrified both times, both times in pain. This was nothing like that. This was just beautiful, just this ephemeral, beautiful thing that you had to experience right that second for all that you could, because you couldn't rewind the experience to play it again, couldn't watch it on TV later and get the same effect, couldn't come out the next weekend and see it again. It lasted 2 minutes and 40 seconds, all of which are impressed on my memory, and yet when the diamond ring appeared again on the other side of the sun, it felt like surely it hadn't been that long. Surely it had just been a couple of seconds.
As the totality passed, someone began to play The Beatles' "Here Comes the Sun" from their car stereo, and people were already packing their cars back up. The kids were beaming. My hands were shaking so hard that I had trouble taking a drink of water. We hit ALL the eclipse traffic on the way back that we missed on the way there--we only saw one car crash happen right in front of us, but the drive that had taken 3.5 hours the day before took more like 7+ on the way home, bumper-to-bumper traffic the whole way.
I don't know what mood I'd be in if I didn't know that there's another total solar eclipse coming in seven years, but there is one coming, and I am buoyant. Better yet, Friends, my town is in the path of totality.
Lemme just repeat that: MY TOWN IS IN THE PATH OF TOTALITY. MY HOUSE WILL SEE AN ECLIPSE!!!
You can come stay in a tent in my backyard, and I'll haul out the lounge chairs. The little kid, who will be graduating from high school the next month, will decorate us eclipse-themed doughnuts. The big kid, home from college for the weekend, will read and ignore us. And we'll have another powerful encounter that's beyond belief, in just seven years.
P.S. Want to follow along with my craft projects, books I'm reading, road trips to weird old cemeteries, looming mid-life crisis, and other various adventures on the daily? Find me on my Craft Knife Facebook page!
Y'all, this is the last day of our Greece adventure!
We spent the night in Kalambaka, the closest town to Meteora, so we had only a short drive in the morning before we were faced with this spectacular vista:
Meteora refers to these rock pillars, but this spot was also where hermits of the Greek Orthodox faith would travel to, and where monasteries were then built on top of these formations:
You can see three separate monasteries in the photograph below:
Naturally, I want a rare photo of the four of us in front of this magical location. Usually, I don't ask strangers to take our photo, because most people can't figure out my DSLR camera; our tour guide, however, is an absolute champion and can work all cameras.
It's not her fault, then, that her beautiful photograph came out looking like this:
Sigh...
Here's a better photo of Will, at least:
And another one of our little Riptide doing what she does best--leaning precariously over ledges and looking at abysses:
See her flip-flops? We had to buy her those way back in Nafplio, because her sandals were so tight they were giving her blisters already. Want to guess how many times I asked her before the trip to reconfirm that her sandals were still comfortable for a week of walking? Want to guess how many snippy answers, spoken sarcastically and followed by a sigh, she gave me that they were FINE, Mom, UGH!!! We don't even have those flip-flops anymore, because she wore them at Holiday World last week and someone stole them while we were in line for the Mammoth. UGH!!!
We stopped for a closer look at St. Stephen--
Yes, the kids and I ARE going to have to comply with that dress code...
--and Syd made some friends there:
Yes, she wrapped up more meat from this morning's breakfast.
But the Great Meteoron Monastery, the largest of all the monasteries of Meteora, is the one that we toured:
It's hard to tell from the photos, especially because I didn't take one overall shot of the monastery as a whole, but it's many levels, with winding passages and little stairways and balconies set over the expanse. And fewer than 10 monks live here now.
People put prayer requests in little hidey holes around the shrines.
They put more prayer requests and cards, as well as money and jewelry, in the shrines themselves.
I even wore pants on this day, but to get into the monastery itself, the kids and I still had to don sarongs, on account of we're filthy females:
I thought that our tickets were so pretty!
I didn't take many photos at the monasteries, because photos weren't allowed in many places there, and certainly not in the sanctuaries, where I spent most of my time, gaping at the frescoes. Here's a little of what I was allowed to photograph:
Meteoron has museum displays of storage rooms illustrating how the monks used to live.
The monks did their own hunting and farming. They harvested grapes, which were eaten fresh, with the excess dried into raisins or fermented into wine. Excess wine was made into vinegar.
We also visited Varlaan monastery, which has preserved the original windlass by which supplies--and monks who couldn't climb the rock faces and ladders--were taken to the monastery:
Matt and Syd were not fans of the long bridge that we now use to get to Varlaan, but I was!
Matt may have been crouched down, clutching the guardrail in fear when he got this shot. Meteora was not his favorite day.
Our legs nice and rubbery from the hundreds of steps, we stopped in a small town to scavenge some lunch (the four of us ended up in a small restaurant where not only did nobody speak English, but they giggled at me when I tried to speak Greek. I am treated like a precocious toddler wherever I travel), then drove through Thessaly on our way back to Athens.
Fun fact: the concept of the centaur was invented in Thessaly. They have these oddly short little horses, the Thessalians, there, and when riders were on them, the proportions sometimes looked like they had the body of a horse and the torso of a person.
The best thing that we saw, though, was the site of the Battle of Thermopylae! The kids and I studied this battle extensively as part of our larger study of the Greco-Persian War, and we even watched The 300 with Will one night when her sister was sleeping over at a friend's house.
Actually, I showed both children the opening scene from The 300, because its inciting incident is also mentioned in several other references. Also it's bad-ass:
The Spartans were for sure messed up, but I am a huge Leonidas fangirl.
See?
The engraving above me reads "ΜΟΛΩΝ ΛΑΒΕ." It's translation is what Leonidas replied when Xerxes told him that he'd spare the lives of the Spartan soldiers, if they'd just lay down their weapons: "Come and take them." Ugh, I love him so much!
The entire afternoon on the bus, actually, Matt and I had been taking turns reading the Tom Holland translation of Herodotus' The Histories to each other and the children, and cracking ourselves up over it, on account of Xerxes was INSANE. He goes to war because of a series of prophetic dreams, and is super mean to his advisors who gently try to suggest that maybe you shouldn't, you know, follow your dreams so literally. This rich guy tries to give Xerxes all of his accumulated wealth, on account of his slaves can just earn him more, and Xerxes is so touched that instead of taking the donation, he actually gives the rich man MORE money and tells him that they're best friends. But when the rich guy asks Xerxes if, since they're such good buddies, he could maybe have just one of his sons back from the war, maybe just the youngest one, Xerxes is all, "Sure, Buddy!" and then calls that kid over and murders him in front of everyone.
So we were all thrilled to see the site of the battle--
Yes, that's the place. The valley where we stood looking at it was underwater, part of the bay at this time, and that narrow pass under that sheer cliff above was the only place the Persians could get their army through.
--and its memorial:
I even got...well, one of the kids to fangirl along with me:
By the time we got back to Athens, we had just a few hours, really, before we had to be at the airport for our flights home. Matt and I walked around the city for as long as we could before we simply had to go back and pack and get a couple of hours of sleep, and then began the sleep-deprived fog of misery that was our trip home. The lines. The family in front of us who had every single thing on the planet in their carry-ons, and also every single small child imaginable, and who took the longest time that it is possible to take fussing with all of their stuff to try to get it onto the security conveyor. And then forgetting stuff and bumping into me and the children to go back and get it. And then shoving back in front of us when they'd collected whatever it was. And every single person on Swiss Air who kept their seat backs reclined the ENTIRE TIME that they were on the plane. If you're a seatback recliner, stop it, because I don't know if it's how short I am or what, but every seat back reclines directly into my face. Like, directly. I promise you that I measured it, and there was six entire inches between my face, sitting straight up, and the reclined seat back in front of me. I watched five movies (Sing, which was good, The Space Between Us, which was bad, Rogue One, which I found many problems in that I hadn't seen the first time I watched it, Gifted, which was good, La La Land, which was so horrible that I couldn't finish, and Mohenjo Daro, also too horrible to finish, even though I LOOOVE Hrithik Roshan) and ate three meals with the seat in front of me six inches from my face. Then we had to stand in line forever at Customs, and then repack all of our luggage into our own unbearable plethora of carry-ons because checking luggage on US flights costs money. And then check in again, and then go through Security AGAIN. And a security person shouted at Matt, and shamed him in front of the entire long line of people behind us, because he didn't have all of our boarding tickets fanned out properly in his hand when he approached her, the monster. And this was also a Security where we had to have our tablets separated from our backpacks but not our books, which is what they wanted the last time. But the kids could keep their shoes on, which they couldn't the last time. And Matt got patted down for a change instead of me, but they naked scanned Syd for the first time. And everyone who ever walked in front of us walked slowly. And all the babies on all the planes were miserable. And I don't know how I wrote down the wrong shuttle stop for our long-term parking, but I did, but at least we passed another couple on our slog across the parking lot who'd also been on our shuttle and had also apparently written down the wrong stop.
But finally, FINALLY we were all back home, kicked back in our big bed, with the dog back from the dog sitter and a couple of pizzas liberated from our favorite restaurant, watching fireworks on TV. At least, that's what we were watching when I finally drifted off and didn't wake up, nor apparently so much as move a muscle, for the next 10 hours.
