Explore the Eclipse with the National Parks Service

There are 21 national parks in the United States where you can see at least part of the solar eclipse on Monday, and the parks service has partnered with the Planetary Society and Bill Nye to teach kids all about it with a special Eclipse Explorer Junior Ranger experience.

Kids who visit parks in the path of the eclipse can get an educational booklet about the eclipse and complete the activities to earn an eclipse badge.

But the booklet is available online, too (this is a link to the PDF), and has some great information in it about why eclipses happen, the different kinds of eclipses and how to view them safely.

There are also activities such as thinking about how what your senses experience might change during an eclipse, calculating how old kids will be for the next eclipse and drawing an eclipse petroglyph, among other things.

This would be fun for kids outside of the parks to complete as well and to connect what they’re learning about eclipses to their own lives.

Are you traveling to see the eclipse? I’d love to hear about your plans!

[Photo: Planetary Society.]

When my daughter was younger I would spend a lot of time trying to come up with activities she could do in the car on long road trips and things to entertain her when we were waiting at restaurants and things that didn’t involve screens.

But it turns out there are a lot of great activities you can do with just a piece of paper and a pen.

What Do We Do All Day has a great collection of pen and paper games, including some that can be done with just one person, though they’re all more fun if you have at least two.

There are some classics on here like hangman and dots and boxes, but there are also quite a few I hadn’t heard of before.

I don’t want to spoil the whole list for you because you should definitely click over there and look around, but I will share about the one that you see pictured above.

This game is called Bridges, and you start by making the big random shape and the dividing it into a bunch of sections (the post says 30-50 sections is ideal but I think this one is smaller than that).

Each player gets their own color marker and you take turns drawing bridges from one space to another, crossing a third. Once there’s a bridge, no other bridges can start, end or cross in those spaces. Keep going until no more bridges can be built, and the person who makes the last bridge wins.

Check out the post over at What We Do All Day for more great ideas for no or almost-no prep games you can play with your kids or that kids can play together. I’d love to know if you have a favorite paper and pen game, whether it’s on this list or a different one.

[Photo: What We Do All Day]

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