50 Dangerous Things You Should Let Your Children Do

It’s only been recently that we even could attempt to look at the sun! There has been so little, for so long. Serendipitously, a class the boys attended recently at the Meadowlands Environmental Center (future post coming!) included viewing the sun as one of the activities. I was so glad that a professional naturalist was in charge of this one – someone with both high-tech and low-tech gear that would make this activity fun and safe. Our book gave directions for making a sun viewer, but the boys got a chance to use one of these. The telescope, with the use of mirrors, reflects an image of the sun onto the flat surface and allows the sun to be clearly seen, including sunspots. They were very impressed with what they saw. I can’t decide if we’ve cheated on this one. They viewed the sun, which was the challenge, but we did not construct the sun-viewer suggested. You can decide for yourself if we cheated 😉

The second way they were able to look at the sun was with these nifty glasses.

Our future’s are so bright…well, you know the rest. It was cool to see the sun at all, but especially up close and personal like we did.

Dangerous? Totally, without all of the special paraphernalia. I don’t know how close your could get to really staring at the sun until it hurt your eyes, but the kids were cautioned against it anyhow. We were able to safely complete this task.