Space night

A unit would not be complete without a culminating event. The boys really love to have a '________ night." They enjoy including daddy in their studies. They enjoy eating a special dinner. And the enjoy having an obstacle course because a culminating event would not be the experience without one!

After doing a bit of research on Pinterest (lol), I found out that tonic water glows when a black light is on. This happens because of a substance called quinine. Finding tonic water in Walmart took an immense amount of patience. The walmart I went to did not keep it by the water or the soda or any other non alcoholic beverage. Nope. why would it be? So after I bought the black light, jello (click on jello to see the original poster) , push lights and other such space gear, I got to drag my 2 rambunctious boys into a liquor store (in walmart) with a multitude of glass bottles so that I could spend less than a dollar on tonic water. Bah! This is why I hate you Walmart! Well that's one of 1,000,000 reasons.

Anyway, the tonic water was a must have. Since space is dark, I chose to capitalize on that rather than break my back coming up with a zillion space crafts and such, we just did a lot in the dark. For dessert, I made jello jigglers using tonic water. They taste a little funky but they do glow. I cut them into stars, placed glasses of tonic water around, shut off the lights and turned on the black light. fun times! I had to turn the lights on a bit so you could tell what you are looking at.

Excuse me while I rewind a bit. We started the night with a special dinner. We ate meteroids (homemade chicken nuggets), planets (peas), and saturn's rings (homemade onion rings). The actual meal really wasn't that good but the boys thought it was neat.

After dinner and dessert, we each picked a planet and created a push light. I spent time printing pictures online for this activity.  This idea came from play at home mom.

Then while I nursed the baby. Bob and the boys played glow stick hide in seek. They took turns hiding glow sticks and letting the others find them. the boys like to run to the room they hid them in and laugh and point. i guess they'll get it eventually.

We had to have our obstacle course. We used the push planets and glow sticks to light the course. The boys ran thru over and over. I hid a few glow in the dark planets (purchased them at Dollar Tree) in a pile of pillows so my little astronauts could discover new stars and planets. Once they were thoroughly sweaty and tired, we thru them in the tub (in the dark of course) with their glow sticks. They were pooped and had a great time!