Salt/Fresh

After naps the children spent a good deal of time outside -- over an hour -- making mud pies (I don't understand how they can sit right down in a mud puddle and not even notice but, hey, I guess that's one of the things you lose when you become an adult). When Steve came home he helped me bathe them and then we had dinner. (And while eating her focaccia bread, BOTH of Natalie's loose teeth came out! One got swallowed by mistake but we have one to put in her tooth fairy pillow, and we'll leave a note telling her about the other tooth.)

After dinner I loaded N and L up in the car and we headed to the Bay with a jar in hand. I forgot to get our salty water sample yesterday. We did a little discussion (I don't know how Waldorf it was, but we did it anyway). First I asked them each if the Bay was salty or fresh. They both knew it was salty from tasting some by mistake. I told them that the Bay was salty because way down at one end, farther than we could see, it was connected to an ocean and oceans have salty water in them. Then we talked about how, when you leave a puddle in the sun, sometimes you come back the next day and it is gone. (For more on puddles, read The Puddle Pail by Elisa Kleven.) The water goes up into the sky to make clouds. We are going to put some salty water from the Bay into this jar and put it on the kitchen table and watch it. The water from the jar is going to go up into the air but the salt will stay behind and we can look at it. So we went down to the water's edge and put a little bit in our jar.

Then I drove the children to a nearby lake and asked them, is the water of the lake salty or fresh? Natalie said, fresh. That's right, I said, because the lake is not connected to an ocean. It gets its water from a stream. Is the water in our sink salty or fresh? Fresh. Because it comes from a river. Is the water in our water bottles salty or fresh? Fresh. It also comes from a river. We don't drink salt water.

And then we headed home.

Lesson done for the day.