Following ten days focused on Creation, Addie, AJ and I started our first unit study on the sun last month. Each "lesson" set is made up of six days of study so we had plenty of time to explore all kinds of things about our daytime light-bearer and the Letter S.

The Biblical tie in was that Jesus is the light of the world so we listened to the Seeds Family Worship song that goes along with John 8:12 various times that week. I also decided to use some MFW Kindergarten supplemental pages I came across online; they seem to be a nice addition to each unit.

We had fun doing experiments with our shadows. Using shadow tracing with chalk out on the driveway, we tracked the movement of our shadows throughout the day and made a chart of our findings. Funny story: the following week Addie was paying special attention to our shadows everywhere we went. One afternoon as we were walking into Walmart, she loudly exclaimed, "Wow, Mom...your belly shadow is HUGE!". To which I simply replied, "Ok...thank you for that." {At least I'm down to the last weeks! Yay!}

One of our goals for each lesson is to make or bake something that begins with the letter we are working on that week. So for the Letter S we made /s/ /s/ sausage balls! Yum!

Perhaps our coolest experiment was when we used the Nature Print Sun-Sensitive Paper I ordered online. First we ventured outside to expose our paper (covered by a few objects we gathered) to the sun for 2 minutes. Then we went to the kitchen and submerged the papers in water for about a minute. As they dried, the "photo" showed up even better; the exposed portions dried a dark blue. We still have quite a few sheets left, so I expect we'll pull them out again a few times throughout the year. Interestingly, I recently came across this $1500 Buckeye Sunprint sold on Terrain's website. Whoa ~ apparently there's money to made in this line of art!