Holiday type of Monday

Today I didn't have drive anywhere. Nope. Not today. Pops had lunch at the workplace for once, so Beans and I actually spent the whole day at our complex, and time flew by.  We rose at our usual time but Beans wanted to get straight to 'work' (we didn't have brekkie til' snacktime).  So off to work we went.
I couldn't believe what we had scored at our super awesome downtown library last weekend.  They actually have unit workboxes you can checkout!  Yes, really. I almost thought it was too good to be true, put there to tease me, that I had to double (triple) check with the librarian. And lo and behold there was a whole unit on weather!

The pic is a bit dark, but the box includes an anemometer, a wind vane, thermometers, activity idea box, charts, a weather storybook, a rain gauge, just a whole lotta cool stuff.

   Beans pretty much wanted to find out what the anemometer and wind vane was for so we took it out in the hot hot florida heat to find out.  Those things didn't spin at all. Hmm.

We recorded our observation the super dry erase experiment chart that came with the kit.

So anyway, I thought it'd be a good opportunity to try out the thermometers.  The box included two old school thermometers. I put one outside for a bit, and left one inside. The outside one seemed pretty accurate, but the inside one..?  I was a bit unsure about that one, but none the less, we recorded the comparisons in Beans journal.  Beans then wanted to put one in the freezer, take a bath with one, sit on one, etc etc, but had to explain that since they didn't belong to us we couldn't do that with the ones from the kit.  She was slightly bummed. I know what to get her for christmas though:)

  There are so many cool ideas, for language arts and science projects with this kid that I was just giddy, but we chose just a couple of other ideas. I followed Beans lead mostly, but we had a kick doing the fill in the blank story card and Weather poem.  Beans filled in the story blanks, I did the poem..I'm just not much of a poet..

Beans had to make her own 'poem' too:)

We took a break after all that busy ness to go deliver a letter Beans wrote for her cousin, Beans rollerskated, fell ,rollerskated, fell,  gave up, then walked all the way to the mail box to deliver this oh so adorable letter she wrote for her cousin.

aww..her first letter. I just about teared:) And I just treasure that little punk rock type looking monster that's supposed to be her cousin.

After meal time the fun didn't stop. Nuh uh. We looked up some pics of rain sticks and conspired to make a Huge one! Time consuming but so very fun!

 I was kinda tough hammering the nails until they penetrated through the tube..especially for a three year old, so I hammered the nail until it just poked through the tube, then I let Beans finish. She thought this was a good idea so she gave me a sweet pat on the head and proceeded to hammer away.

Once all those nails were in (which we just followed the spiral around the tube), we spilled the beans! (ha) right into that giant tube.  Beans, rice and aquarium pebbles.

Ta da!  Very rainy sounding rainstick.

We hammered and hammered nails into that thing. We used up maybe 150 nails? Beans estimated 572:) Good estimate lil kid.