Moon Week/Mid-Autumn Festival

The big, fantastic, once every thirty-something years, amazing Super Moon was going to show its self, so we followed it with learning all about the moon.  The Chinese celebration of Mid-Autumn Festival takes place during the harvest moon, so we celebrated, too!

The girls were very excited about seeing a special moon outside, after bedtime, while eating apple pie! We covered up and brought our tp tube telescopes to help us see the moon closer.

They're cute almost always, but this time they were supermoon cute!  The moon never came out from behind the clouds which was dissapointing, but spending time with the girls and eating pie is always fun.

Since the real moon was so unreliable, we made our own lumpy, bumpy moon.

The girls practiced their gluing skills by gluing different sized beans to cardboard to make the surface of our moon more like the real moon.

They have fun squeezing the glue out and now that they are a little bit older I can leave them to finish something like this and not worry about them gluing beans to their hair, clothes, etc. ; ). Before they didn't have the hand strength to squeeze glue or the coordination to place the beans without 100% of my attention and assistance.  They've come so far!

Once they were done, we covered them with tin foil and pressed it into their lumpy, bumpy moon (pictures further on down).

I drew the different phases of the moon on the chalkboard for them to color in and FL erased it all and made her own set!   She was very proud!  Not too bad, Lin Lin!

Their favorite activity of the week was "walking on the moon".  I took different pillows and cushions, placed them on the mat and covered with a flat sheet.

They tired walking, rolling, running and jumping on the moon!  It got all those sillies out, burned some energy and gave me time to make dinner!

Our dog, Ella, was not ok with all of the falling, shrieking, jumping and potential for harm.  She monitored the girls the whole time and performed sniff tests to make she they were truly ok if they hurled themselves down to the moon's surface for fun, which they did.  Several times.  I don't know how they did it without taking ibuprofen the next day...

After burning off all of that energy,x they settled down and read some moon books from the library of they own, comfy, well-oxygenated moon.

The "moon" was easy to set up and take down, so we used it often.

We celebrated Chinese Mid-Autumn Festival, or the Moon Festival, this week.  The girls helped me make a slightly sweet, traditional Chinese dessert of almond cookies.  Here they are signing "moon" each in their own way (C hand around the eye).

Their fine motor and touch skills were tested when they had to roll the dough into little round moons.

It is easier than it looks!

Their favorite part was pressing their thumb lightly (or not so lightly!) into each cookie and putting (or aggressively squashing) an almond into their thumbprint (also known as a crater).  Great job, girls!

Like their mama, they really like to bake (and eat it all up!)!

While the cookies baked and I set up for our little celebration, the girls entertained themselves with "moon mud" (cornstarch and water).  I didn't think FL would like this at all because she hates it when she can't easily get something off of her hands, but they both were "over the moon" (sorry, I couldn't resist!) with moon mud!   They were so quiet and so busy!!!

It was incredibly messy and I scolded myself for letting them do this inside on this particular day, but the clean up was so easy that we will be doing this again soon.  Maybe the next rainy day!

Once Sam arrived home with some Chinese food (the soup I attempted was a flop : /), the girls dressed up in their silks, donned their China shoes (as they call them) and I redid their hair in a way that seemed a little more Chinese to me from what I remember. 

We put our almond cookies and our Guangdong Happy Cat in the middle of the table as well as the girls' lumpy, bumpy texture moons.  A string of white lanterns reminded us of the moon that God created, so we plugged them in and but them across the sideboard.

This is one of the biggest festivals in China, so we tried to make our own little celebration a big deal in our own little way. : ).  They like dressing up, having their hair done and eating cookies, so they were excited and happy!

Later in the week, we took our lumpy, bumpy moons and talked about how the moon reflects the sunlight.  It was way over their heads, but they enjoyed flashing their moons in the light or a bright, sunny window.

Their moons worked very well at demonstrating how our moon works...

With their backs to the window, they caught the sunlight and it reflected back onto their sweet faces and shirts, illuminating them so well.  We will have to do this again when they are older and can truly grasp it!

We made more moons by covering cardboard and some paper plates with a glue/shaving cream mixture (1/2 cup glue with 1 1/2 cups shaving cream and a little glitter thrown in because we are girls that like glitter!).  I let them play with it for so long that they worked all of the fluffy out of the mixture so it didn't quite achieve the effect I was going for, but that's ok.  They had fun and explored. : )

I was pleasantly surprised again at how much FL enjoyed this messy play.  I guess she trusts that I am really and truly going to clean her hands up each time, and that I want her to get messy!  Look at that sweet smile!

And this dainty girl has always dove right in to messy play with reckless abandon!

Once dry (ours took about 24 hours), they cut out the shapes that I had already traced on the paper.   It was a lot of cutting, so I did help them out a lot.

Once the shapes were cut out, I made them a simple match-up puzzle for the phases of the moon.  I put the names of the phases so I could remember and tell them myself!  They caught on very quickly!

I let C and FL cut up the remnants of the shaving cream moons to keep them busy and we ended up making another simple craft out of it by gluing the leftover pieces to the inside of a circle to form a full moon.  Lots of fine motor skills used, cutting practice and no distractions getting dinner on the table were a definite plus!

Here are all of our moons:

Nothing impressive as far as the crafts go, but a lot of learning, growing and fun took place this week, and that is what all of this is all about! : ).   I know we will be flying back to the moon to learn more in the future!