Sun Earth Moon Stars

As the days grew shorter, my little Einstein started noticing things like darkness and light, and its relationship to other things. Its been facinating to watch as the little connections unfold and at the end of it, we hit another milestone..... the "why" question.

At first, it was just observations.... "its dark! I see moon, I see stars too!", and then asking the next morning "where moon go?". I started explaining the basics about the way the sky works, and he had been asking about it every day to make sure nothing had changed. "Sun come up. It daytime! Not dark!".

The other day, I picked him up from daycare a little early and he noticed the moon was not up yet. I told him since it was still light out, we would go to the park to play until the sun went down. And we did - we caught 20 minutes on the slides and swings until the sun reminded us that we were on borrowed time and I announced it was time to go home.

M: "The sun is going down, its time for us to go home"

Z: "Get dark?"

M: "Yes, it will be getting dark soon"

Z: "No light outside?"

M: "The sun is the light for the outside. When it goes down, it gets dark outside. That's when we can see the moon and stars"

Z: "Sun go down. Light off. Nighttime"

M: "Yes, the sun goes down and then its nighttime"

Z: "Why that happen?"

M: "Ummmmmmmmmmm. Are you ready to eat dinner?!"

I believe in explaining the real deal to kids, in an age appropriate way. Like instead of telling him that Mr. Sandman turns off the lightswitch to the sun to tell kids when its time to go to bed, I would prefer to explain on a small scale why the sun goes down. I just didn't know how to scale that one down for my not-quite two year old. I didn't think I'd be considering building models of the solar system before preschool, for crying out loud!