Fun with kids

 Back when I was a kid my Mom and her friends used to get together and mix up a big batch of salt dough for Christmas ornaments. They made all kinds of great things like, Santa, Christmas trees, Angels, and Wreaths. They used a garlic press to make hair and beards, and cloves to make the stems on the fruit of the wreaths. Then they would paint them with acrylic and seal them with poly-urethane to make them shine. It was fun and it seemed like a good way to pass a Sunday. Today I called my Mom and got the recipe.

Half cup water

Half Cup Salt

One cup flour.

Mix it up and roll it out with a little loose flour to keep it form sticking. Roll it to about a quarter inch thick, and then get out the cookie cutters. Once your ornaments are done, bake them on a cookie sheet for 2 hours at 250 degrees. Be sure to leave a hole so you can use a ribbon or an ornament hook to hang it on your tree. 

Today, I mixed up some dough, but not for ornaments. My daughter has a school project due Tuesday. It's a model of the solar system. We made planets. They came out looking great. I'm not much of painter, so after my wife returned form work they sat down to paint. Gray for Mercury, Yellow for Venus, and so on. It's fun to work with the kids on this kind of stuff.

One of the interesting  things that I learned from my daughter was the relative size of the sun compared to the planets. If Jupiter was only 5" in diameter, the Sun would be just under 55" in diameter. Considering Jupiter is 143,000 kilometers in diameter, in proportion the sun is 1,440,000 kilometers in diameter. The planets are a great subject to teach the kids, and it's a great subject to learn from them.