Egg-stronauts and the Space Race

We are coming to the end of our history presentations group gatherings. The last one for this year was on the Space Race...who could fly to the moon first? USA or Russia?
Our presentations were all about space flight, rockets and space, it's self.

We've had quite a year--traveling from the 1850's on through to the present time. Next year, we'll be going back to the beginning--ancient world history.

During most of the presentations Liam was able to listen....however, a little two year old body and sit still for only so long, and he found the toys set aside little hands in the other room. Aaahhh, I have the world in my hands!

Connor's presentations was on the space shuttle--(Connor do you remember the amazing deal for the legos space shuttle you found on line--only to be disappointed when it came?!)

Ryan's presentation was on black holes.

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Cailin's presentations was on animals....(of course,) Did you know that animals were the first mammals in space. She talked about Ham the chimpanzee and Lakia the dog plus other little animals--squirrels, fruit flies (okay, not a mammal) and other live creatures.

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A seredipitious moment--or should that be, a moment of serendipity came when we got to watch the takeoff of the Space Shuttle Atlantis.

Who knew, that when we had planned our calendar for the year that our unit on the space race would coincide with the launch of the Atlantis.

What an amazing sight.

Enjoying a favorite treat of the astronauts--pudding in a bag.

Place pudding mix and dry milk in a zip lock bag. Add water. Close the bag and gently mix the contents together. Open the bag slightly--just enough to insert a straw. Suck on the straw to eat the yummy pudding inside.
Delaney's presentation was to show the kids how to make a rocket salad. Take a lettuce leaf, top with a pineapple slice. Insert a half of a banana in the center of the pineapple and top with a cherry.
Everyone seemed to enjoy making their own rocket salad...and eat it too!

Refreshments after the presentations are a favorite part of the day. I especially enjoy getting to chat with my friends while the kids go out to play.

At home, we took one morning to have fun with one space related project. I had so many I wanted to do.....alkaseltzer bottle rockets, making comets with dry ice, building our own rockets with various crafting materials...the one we did do was parachuting eggs from the window down to the ground.

Scientist have to find the best way to get 'stuff' or payloads, from the rockets to a destination--like the Eagle to the surface of the moon.
We used an egg as our payload. We then created 3 parachutes of plastic, cloth and paper and experimented with them to see which would safely land our payload--a raw egg from the upstairs window to the ground below.

All three parachutes took 5 seconds to descend and they all got the raw egg to the ground without cracking the egg, but the kids all thought that the paper parachute did the job with more ease.

A quick 5 second travel down......
"Houston, the egg has landed" and not one crack to be had. A sucessful trip!
Yeah, our egg-stronaunts have safely landed.

We also enjoyed watching a few movies related to this time period--October Sky and on netflix one night, we found a silly movie about 3 flies who went a board Apollo 11 for the famous flight to the moon--it was called "Fly Me to the Moon".