The Gyrator and the Weather Tree

Zac and I are celebrating the Twelve Days of Christmas with a gift or special activity each day.

In the morning he reads the riddle that I write and put in the middle of the ring, and uses the clues to find a hidden present or note about what we are doing. As the years go by, the riddles have gotten harder and harder!

Yesterday he got to make a lantern, and in the evening we got together with friends and did a Lantern Walk and a Solstice Spiral. It was a beautiful night, and a favorite way to celebrate the cycle of the seasons.

He made the lantern using the instructions I typed up a few years back: What Do You Do with Old Birthday Candles?

It was quick and came out really well. Then when we lit the candle inside, we discovered that the wings glowed in the light!

I got lots of other ideas on that Lantern Walk as well. One friend adhered dried Autumn leaves to the outside of her lantern, over the tissue paper base, and it was beautiful! Another covered her jar in salt, which sparkled!

I just love to see all the little lights bobbing along as people walk through the nighttime forest!

This year we also celebrated the Winter Solstice by visiting the Gyrator sculpture (behind Giant City Lodge) for the first time. I was so excited! This sculpture has a circular cutout through which the sun's rays pass at solar noon (here are the times for Makanda IL). On the Equinoxes and Solstices, the beam of light lands perfectly on a bronze plaque on the ground.

There also a ring at the top of the sculpture, through which you can always see the North Star.

http://www.vectortheartoffabricating.com/1990-gyrator-by-stephen-luecking/

The Shortest Day
by Susan Cooper

I had been wanting to go for years, ever since my friend Trish told me about it, and this year we finally did! The Gyrator would make a great field trip for the next time I teach about Astronomy.

There are a few more special seasonal traditions I'm looking forward to! On New Year's Eve, we do ceromancy with the Fortune-Telling with Wax - New Year's Activity Kit from A Toy Garden. It's really fun to pour the melted wax in cold water and see the shape it takes as it hardens. Is it a mushroom? Is it a bird? Then you use the little booklet to decode your future.

https://atoygarden.com/products/fortune-telling-with-wax-new-years-activity-kit

On New Year's Day, we set up the Weather Tree (PDF) from All Year Round: A Calendar of Celebrations. We did this for the first time back in 2007! In the past we have always done the little kid version of this, where we colored in a leaf based on the weather (snow, rain, sun, etc).

But now that Zac is in Third Grade, and Measurement is our big Math focus, I think I'd like to do it with Temperature.

Reading a thermometer is the hardest of all the measurement tools, since each one can have a different scale. That's not true with clocks or rulers! So it takes a TON of practice.

It would be super easy to check the temperature every day at noon (we do that anyway, before we go out to recess!) and have the color key represent ranges of numbers instead. That would help the third graders practice reading a thermometer; a different child could be in charge of it each day.

There are seven leaves in the key, so we could have seven temperature colors, and then just leave it white if it's below freezing.

32 or lower - white
33-39 - silver
40-49 - purple
50-59 - blue
60-69 - green
70-79 - yellow
80-89 - orange
90 or higher - red

I could also write the actual temperature in my plan book each day, so that we could then find the average temperature for each month. When I student taught at the Campus School of Smith College, Mrs. Szymaszek kept a list of the daily temps and the children calculated the average every month and graphed it. In Waldorf, finding averages (mean, median, mode, and range) is part of the 6th grade Business Math block... as is making and reading a graph. So that could be a special job for the older children!

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