Weather Themed Sensory Tub

Now that school is out for the summer, I'm finally getting back to some of our preschool crafts and activities. We hadn't been doing a whole lot in that department over the last few months, and I'm running out of time!  It's hard to believe that my son will be starting kindergarten at the end of next month!  This summer is going to go so fast!

We've made a few trips to the library in the past couple weeks and aside from signing up for the summer reading program and picking up all kind of story books, we picked up several books about weather.  I grabbed books about storms, tornadoes, wind, and sun.  We are going to spend some time learning about the weather!  And so far, the weather has been perfect too, because one morning we woke up and it was raining.  I pulled out the book about rain, and we made a raindrop craft.  Yesterday was cloudy, so we learned about different types of clouds.  Today is bright and sunny, so we are reading a book about the sun and making a happy sun craft!

To go with our weather studies, I decided to put together a quick weather themed sensory tub.

It's been a while since I've made a new sensory tub for the kids to play with so when they realized what I was doing, they were pretty excited!

The main ingredient in this sensory tub is of course cotton ball clouds!  Yesterday's cloud activity used cotton balls to depict different types of clouds.  We based it on this post from Carrots are Orange.  And now I'm completely out of cotton balls!

I used the same big yellow gear for a sun that I used in our Space themed sensory tub.  I added a few hard golf balls and some little white pom poms to represent hail and snowflakes.  Thanks to last month's hailstorm, the kids are very familiar with how hard (and damaging) hail can be!

The tiny blue beads represent raindrops, and turned out to be a perfect choice.  The kids were picking them up and letting them drop out of the clouds like rain!  

I cut cloud shapes out of a dark patterned piece of felt to represent storm clouds, and I cut lightning bolts out of yellow foam sheets.  As I was going through our craft cabinet I came across some weather words from an old calendar we had and put them in the bin as well.  We can practice spelling out the words, and they can guess what the words are by the pictures on them.  

I found some little American flags that I put in as well.  My son was confused as to what they had to do with weather, until I asked him what made the flags move.  He held it up and blew on it, and then he yelled "wind!"  

The best part of watching them play with their new sensory tub is when they started using all the pieces to act out the Itsy Bitsy spider.  I ran and grabbed a spider from our old Halloween tub, and they put on a little play of the song!  Priceless!!

The flags I've always wanted to take a picture of!

We live near a small town cemetery, but it has got to be one of the busiest cemeteries I've ever seen.  I'm not saying that like there are a lot of funerals there, but that there are always lots of people visiting!  Nearly every single grave is decorated year round, and people gather there frequently to reminisce or just be near their loved ones.   One time I drove by to see an old man sitting on a bench in front a headstone.  Hours later when I was returning home, he was still sitting there.

Each year around major holidays honoring our country's servicemen and women, about a hundred (or more) small American flags surround a monument dedicated to the members of the armed services who are buried in this cemetery.  It's a beautiful sight, but before now one that I've only admired as I drove right by.

On Memorial Day, I walked over to take some pictures.  Well I got about halfway there and realized that some kind of ceremony was going on.  There was music playing and police cars, a firetruck, and motorcycles everywhere.  We watched from a distance for a while and then turned around and made our way to the park instead.  I'd wait to take pictures when I wouldn't be in the way.

Today I got my chance.  On our way to the library, I noticed the flags were still up.  The sun was shining, and this part of the cemetery was deserted.  So I pulled the van over and pulled out the camera.  I absolutely love that I can do that!  I only snapped a few shots because the kids were eager to get to the library, but the next time they flags go up, I'll probably stop and snap some more!

Warp Speed Photography

I might have a new obsession inside of my new photography obsession!  I discovered an amazing photographer named Jakob Wagner who has a collection called "Urban Zoom" photogrpahy.  Check it out here.  That's just his gallery of photos, which are amazing but didn't tell me anything about how to get those kind of shots.

I hit Google and started looking for warp speed tutorials.  I came across a blog that gave the very basic idea of how to create the shot.  It sounded pretty simple, but I'm missing a very key ingredient:  Lights!

It was getting late in the day and on a very overcast day anyway, but I setup the tripod anyway to get some practice.  I figure the more I practice at home the better chance I'll have of getting the shot I want when I hit downtown or somewhere else that has the lights I'm looking for.

Here's a look at my first few shots.

The shots are a lot darker than I'd prefer, but where we live there aren't many lights.  I only had the sky to help.  The effect is still there though, and I quickly figured out that zooming in while taking the shot does better than zooming out.  

I have many more ways I want to practice these warp speed shots at home before venturing to the city at night.  I want to spend some time with different exposure lengths and starting/stopping at different focal lengths.  I think I could setup some Christmas lights or Tiki torches outside to give me a light source to zoom in on.  

When I get those things figured out, I'm also thinking about setting up the tripod on top of the parking garage at the airport!  Can't wait to see if I can catch some planes travelling at warp speed!