The Great American Eclipse 2017

We were not in the path of totality, but were close enough to get about a 72% eclipse.

Being a homeschool mom also automatically put me into some sort of "what can we learn from this" mode when I first found out about the eclipse.

Honestly though, I hadn't realised the gravity of the event until I had gone online to do research so that I could share what I had learned with the little boy.

Thankfully, there was an abundance of information and educational videos out there.

A couple of days before the eclipse, the little boy and I did some activities and watched some of the videos I had previewed.

The night before the eclipse, I tried to make sure we got all our stuff together and that we would be as ready as we could be.

We had purchased our booklet and solar eclipse viewing glasses from Walmart well over a month ago,

and made sure to check they were actually legit before we used them.

I wasn't too concerned about getting any passable photographs of the eclipse, leaving that to the experts.

I was more interested in making it a fun and educational experience for the little boy.

We tried various ways of viewing the eclipse.

First, there was the look-straight-into-the-sun-CAREFULLY-with-your-ISO-CERTIFIED-eclipse-glasses method. :P

Then, we tried a very rough pinhole eclipse viewer using a cardboard box like the ones kids used to use way back when.

Next, we experimented with our metal steamer/colander.  It produced pretty magnificent images.

Here's the image that we got at the beginning of the eclipse,

and here's the image we got at the peak.

Next, we tried some other methods of creating pinholes, like using a piece of cardstock paper,

and through interlaced fingers.

We also discovered that our hands made cool shadows that looked like we had webs between our fingers or at least, some lumpity bumps.

Last but not least, we checked out the crescent shaped shadows the leaves were casting :)