Science & Art: BBC Nature's Tree of Life Poster

Scout Kid has been very interested lately in the concept of ancestors and how old species are. Trying to explain the phylogenetic tree of life to a four-year-old isn't the easiest, but BBC Nature has this cool, free-download poster, which is a place to start. I think he might still be a little young for exploring the Tree of Life Web Project, but I have it waiting in the wings for when he's a little more literate.

Dark Skies Follow-Up

Stumbled across a few more starry finds since posting about light pollution on Tuesday.

What Makes a Star Starry?

Tyler Nordgren's National Parks by Night Posters

Gorgeous silk scarf printed from the Suomi NPP satellite's image of the US at night.

Beautiful Things: NASA's Exoplanet Travel Posters

Experience the charm of gravity assists!

We're currently polishing up the rental house here in Georgia; you know, little things like putting laminate over the bare concrete floors and painting over an apparent lifetime of scuffs + the world's literal worst paint-edging job. The boys' room here is all fresh and lovely now, with a bright blue coat of paint of the smudged grey and pretty wood-look laminate floors, but it does still need a little something. Serendipitously, I stumbled across these travel posters from NASA's Jet Propulsion Lab-- and they're free to print! We're probably going to grab The Grand Tour and Enceladus for the boys' room, but Skydiving a Super Earth and the Venus cloud observatory are also wonderful. 

Art: Charcoal Drawing

I'm not much of an artist myself but I figure this year we'll just explore different mediums and in future I can get an actual art course that gives Scout Kid a little bit more helpful instruction. So today we swapped out his staple markers for charcoal pencils. Here's what we did, for about half an hour, guided by Scout Kid's interest:

-Picked a few toys to draw from: a wooden toy car and an alligator puppet.

-Draw the car. Talked about the shapes we could see and copied them one by one.

-Drew the alligator. Much of this involved making ferocious zigzags for "darp teef". 

-Experimented with smudging and shading. Enjoyed how messy our fingers were getting.

-Added some brown and red pencil crayon colouring to the pictures at Scout Kid's request.

-Wrote 'car', which Scout Kid attempted to replicate, and 'alligator', which he did not, on the picture along with the date and added it to Scout Kid's Learning Binder.

Homeschooling: Colour Mixing

Yesterday's activity was a quick study in colour mixing. It wasn't really the day (Mondays are meant to be for English, which still sounds like a really pompous thing to do with a two-year-old, but whatever: English, we read Huckle and Lowly. Anyways. Tangent.)

For this activity I made some homemade paint from a recipe I'm not going to link because it wasn't that good. I think I'm going to go with boughten paint in future, toxic or no, because I'm not prepared to sacrifice all my food colouring in an effort to get true red so we can do a proper colour mixing exercise. What we did:
-Watched this video on the colour wheel. I was pleased to find this, so simple and slow.
-Mixed up some flour/cornstarch paint and explained how he could mix different colours to make new ones.
-Let him at it! You will see from left to right that he made some beautiful muddy colours with my original neons. He also experimented with dripping paint all over the place and making letters (his U is in the right-hand picture). And painted a dirtbike and a trail for it. A good day's work.

Art: Zaria Forman

Digging the large-scale pastel landscapes of Zaria Forman. Kinda want to buy one for the living room.

Foundland Fridays: Great Lakes Letterpress Prints

7"x5" letterpress prints made in Thunder Bay, Ontario, $32 for a set of five. From Harry Canary on Etsy.