Driving home from the Evergreen Aviation & Space Museum last week, Nate shot this photo. The clouds were amazing, but this one touched down to the ground into a sort of funnel. Now – We are West Coasties – Not North Carolina, and this was “before the tornados” but it looked really eeeerie. We had been driving along naming clouds, formations, weather patterns, having our normal geeky car trip. Some people sing show tunes?  Ya. Not us.

Fast forward to this week – Here is a pic of the sky on Tuesday. To the left of the flag is a rainbow, with a sky full of great cloud formations. Too lazy to stitch a panoramic view but – you get the picture. I think we have all been seeing this sky this week!

The only trouble – is that it was 36 degrees out side – so we took up the best seat in the house to sketch for a while.

Jon started out with his Drawing Textbook – starting with a Rocket.  I thought it was interesting that his Rocket is now sketched into a launching pad.  And, he has the perception of going around the world from Sun to Moon. Maybe from a quote he read at the Museum from John Glenn,

“I don’t know what you can say about a day in which you have seen four beautiful sunsets.” The quote goes on to say – “ three in orbit, and one on the surface after I was back on board the ship.”

So we took out our favorite Weather Books, and filled out our Observations, After the rainbow, Jon’s interpretation was the following sketch: His notes – “That he found a new fun way to draw a heart, and it works for clouds as well, that he put a star on top of his “Tree”, and named him Sponge Bob, and he was lonely, so his friends came along, and wasn’t that a cool tornado we saw last week? And I wonder who’s house got the gold?”

Nathan did a really beautiful drawing of the funnel type cloud we saw near McMinnville, but he asked for it not to show up on the blog.

This last photo is for encouragement to the moms starting out – or the moms who don’t think their children “like” science or sketching or nature.  When we were at the Aviation & Space Museum, the boys seemed to only like the games, yet Jon came home remembering the Jon Glenn quote and incorporated it into a drawing 6 days later. The above photo fell out of our favorite weather book.  We were watching crazy cloud formations over the Central Oregon High Desert, and we were having Water Drops fall on Construction Paper so we could trace how big the water droplets were.  Here is our little family with our water droplet page and the ever present Tornado, which he later said was the fence to the south of our property. See that date?  2 years ago. I had to look, think, and cross reference another project to make sure I didn’t mean 2008.  Nope.  Jon was cracking up at his People.  

So – little by little, day by day, week by week, encourage them to be creative, sketching, observant – and then see how they re-create the world  to which they have been exposed.

We were on the lookout for Spring Weather this week – thanks to the Outdoor Hour Challenge by the Handbook of Nature Study!

Schedule for Spring 2011