The Moon

We recapped moon phases, first with a quick oral quiz, then checking by reading the book Hello Mr Moon (can't recommend this book enough!).

So why does the moon look different as the month goes on? Because its always there, but we can only see the parts reflecting the sun... Which changes as the moon orbits the Earth! (I had the ambition to make a model of this using ping pong balls and colouring them in, but you know, lack of time with a baby! Alhamdulillah the girls are bright and seemed to get the concept without one, just from books, YouTube vids and our visit to the National Space Centre!)

So we wrote up this prediction together:

And decided to try and keep a moon diary to test if it was true!

I thought now would be a good time of year to do this activity, since the sun sets earlier, the nights are longer, and there would be more opportunity to see the moon - right? Turns out not really, because the nights were so cold they were often too foggy to see anything. And the moon spends most of the early part of the night behind the houses across the street, so they would have had to stay up until past 8pm to see it anyway. 😖 Never mind though! So we started out our diaries, but after the first week had 5 days of "too cloudy", we decided to just keep an eye on the moon whenever we could - with the expectation it would be a new moon again in line with the new Islamic month and full again a month from when we started our investigation... Which, of course, it was! 🌕🌖🌗🌘🌑🌒🌓🌔🌕