This activity was originally inspired by an Atlas book that we had brought home from the library. Me and Leif were scanning the first few pages, trying to make it brief since the book is a bit out of his age range when we came upon a spread about the solar system. He's been showing interest in space and planets lately so I jumped up to grab his Usborne book and stand it up in front of the library book. He suddenly seemed intrigued about looking at the book from that angle and it all just went from there.

I had been meaning to dive into our little pile of colored clay that we haven't used in a while. I'm always excited to play with clay, that was always my favorite as a kid. We began separating the primary colors (as best we could since it has been used before) and then we began rolling them and shaping them in to the planets on the book. Of course we couldn't forget Jupiter's rings (we used paper clips for those). While we were creating the planets I explained small facts to Leif that are easy to remember. Such as, Mars is the closest planet to the sun and has lots of holes in it because it's constantly being beat up by rocks and that all of the planets rotate in circles around the sun. After that I left it open-ended and let him take the reigns. He did. By building a colossal lump of clay into some sort of awesome foreign object. Way to go for creativity!

Oh yes, this little boy is officially in the sticker-loving phase!

For a few blissful moments he quieted down to poke holes in his beat-up Mars planet.