The Moon Above

The moon is one of the first words children learn, we see it at night, sometimes we see it during the day, and it is always changing: waxing and waning and drawing our interest. This is our family’s second year in the Kids Moon Club (a waste-free experiential gift) and we’ve learned a lot along the way. Every moon month has several different names, January’s was the Wolf Moon – a time of seeking, but other culture’s have different names and traditions. There is no right or wrong – the point is to take note of the moon’s changing cycle and get outside to notice (being an excellent noticer is every nature kid’s superpower). Participants are challenged to create a new name for each month’s moon based on their family’s journey.

We’ll read books on the theme of the month and hold a full moon party with music. Books may be about the animal, e.g. wolves or an emotional theme. In January we read When Wolves Howl by Georgia Graham which portrays life in a wolf pack, but also listened to Julie of the Wolves by Jean Craighead George as an audiobook which chronicles a young Inuit woman’s survival in the Alaskan wilderness. (We loved the story of self-reliance and that Julie’s survival hinged on the wolves accepting her as a packmate – but this story was written in 1972 and is culturally dated.) Before the pandemic we visited the observatory at the University of Saskatchewan to look at the moon through their telescope, but you can see many moon features with just your eyes, or with binoculars.

We saw this experiment on Mystery Science, it only requires a few simple household materials so we can re-create the moon’s phases. You will need:

A pencil
Sticky tack
A ping pong ball
A flashlight or table lamp with the shade removed

In this experiment your head is the earth, the sun is the lamp, and the moon is the ping pong ball. The experiment will work best in a dark room e.g. a bathroom.

Put the sticky tack on the pencil tip and attach it to the ping pong ball. Turn on your light and hold up the ‘moon’, you want to look up at it and keep it steady. As you rotate your body in a circle you will see that the lamp first lights up a crescent on the moon, then a half moon, grows to a full moon, and then slowly starts to get smaller again. By slowly revolving your body you will see every phase of the moon appear on the ping pong ball until you are back facing the sun and the moon is dark, this is called a new moon when whole cycle begins again. Here is the link to Mystery Science so you can see this experiment for yourself.