This wasn't really a block, but more of an extra lesson done each day in addition to our regular block. This is the second year we have sat out and watched the rising of the Harvest Moon in September, so I guess we can say it's an official tradition.
I decided to use the Harvest Moon to kick off our moon phase month. I got the idea from the Our Little Nature Nest blog. (I would provide a link so that I could properly cite my source, but it looks like she has made her blog private.) Each night we observed the moon and charted what type of moon it was and whether it was waxing or waning. Dallin made a special book where he recorded his observations through an entire month of moon phases. We started out the block by me telling the Jataka Tale of The Hare in the Moon, and then the kids tried to spot the rabbit on the moon, which was actually really easy. We also spent some time talking about the moon in general and why it appears different each night.
You'd think this would be a very easy nightly activity, but alas, not so much. I learned things about the moon that I never knew. (The teacher always learns more than the student, right?) I had no clue that the moon doesn't actually rise and set at the same time each night. I thought the moon always came up after the sun went down and set at dawn (although I never could quite understand why you could sometimes see the moon during the day). No--the moon actually rises at sunset or shortly after on the first night of the full moon, but then each night moonrise is later and later until it is so late that you can't see it unless you get up first thing in the morning. It is difficult to see the moon at all during her waning phases because of this. Later on in the cycle, the moon is visible in the daytime sky and sets earlier in the night. This made our project challenging because it wasn't long before I couldn't let Dallin stay up late enough to watch the moon in the evening, yet he wasn't keen on being woken up before sunrise to see it in the morning. So we did have a few days where Mom simply had to tell him what kind of moon it had been. Also, he got bored about two weeks into the project and was less than thrilled about having to go look at the moon, even if it was for just a minute or so. But we did it--we made it through an entire month!
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