Monday was our first day of Astronaut Training, and it went pretty good! We started our day with a small snack and some water before doing some Cosmic Kids Yoga for our Astronaut Exercise. It was a bit of a rough start, with both of us wishing we could nap through it instead, but we finished strong! Ivy started learning Russian on the Duolingo app, since we discovered that NASA requires all astronauts to learn it before going into space. Our Astronaut Academics was to work on a science kit which just happened to be about astronomy! We read cards with planet data (the numbers were difficult for us to comprehend, and the measurement labels were not easy to read when they were written at all) and popped together a mini solar system model - THAT GLOWS IN THE DARK!
Tuesday was aerobics for our Astronaut Exercise, and we decided to jump rope. She struggles getting the rope into a complete swing, but she kept trying! After school she did some more Russian - our goal now is 100 experience points each day. Astronaut Academics was a treat this afternoon: The Oklahoma Hall of Fame was hosting a virtual program about Oklahoma astronauts! Ivy was the only person who attended the program for that particular session, so the facilitator was kind enough to engage Ivy regularly throughout the program.
We struggled a little bit on Wednesday to hold it together; after about a month of virtual school, she is getting a bit... creative... with her assignments. On one assignment she was supposed to use blocks that represent 1's, 10's, and 100's to "draw" an animal. Well, this young lady needed her unicorn to have multicolored hooves, rainbow hair, eyes, nose, mouth, ears - THE WORKS. It was too much to count for the assignment and I had to help her fix it, which was very disappointing for my artsy astronaut. But she still got her Russian done, and we read a few short minutes about ocean life for our Astronaut Academics. Our Astronaut Exercise for Wednesday was what I call "Navy PT" (for lack of a better term), which includes: sit-ups, push-ups, squats, jumping jacks, burpees, and bear crawls. My abs are still not happy with my meager twenty sit-ups in one minute. Hey, I've been a civilian for more than 10 years! Two minutes was just too much 😅
Thursday! Almost done with the week. Our Astronaut Exercise was weightlifting, but since Ivy is only 8 year old, she couldn't safely lift the weights, so we did all of our exercises with her using full ketchup bottles, then we did the exercises again with her holding the weight-less shafts, using the discs to mark positions on the floor. She is becoming pretty proud of her Russian skills for only being four days in. Our Astronaut Academics for today will be exploring the
#ObserveTheMoon pages on the NASA website and drawing astronomy-related pictures. #ObserveTheMoon happens this weekend, September 26th, but she will be hanging out with her dad all day Saturday (who is graciously giving me some much-needed quiet time!), so we will just celebrate today and Friday. Friday's Astronaut Exercise will be games - this gives Ivy an opportunity to lead our exercises so that she feels a bit of ownership over the training. We enjoyed the "Mission Control" balance activity on the "
Train like an Astronaut" series from KidsActivityDownloads.com as extra exercise on Monday, so we might use some other videos in the series for our Friday exercise games. Friday is also our experiments day for Astronaut Academics, and we will probably finish exploring the solar system kit that we started on Monday, as well as continuing our #ObserveTheMoon research.
On the whole, Astronaut Training has been fun and easy to incorporate into our daily routine. I'm a planner, so obviously I over-scheduled it on paper, but when it came down to executing the plan it was very easy to just go with the flow (probably because I also plan "buffer time" into my activity slots!). We are doing well with lightly structured exercise in the morning (no fixed amount of time, just doing things til we are done) and one reading/watching/doing activity in the afternoons, with 15 minutes (or less) of Russian where we can fit it. I am optimistic about our Astronaut Training, and I can't wait til our Astronaut Training next week!
(But really I can't wait for my free time on Saturday)
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