Sunny Days

On Saturday, we took a fun family trip to a local Flower & Jazz Festival.  Main Street was totally shut down for the big event and they had all kinds of plants and flowers, great live music and dancing, good food, craft vendors, and free stuff too!  One of my favorite parts was a grouping of 12 tables all dedicated to teaching kids about safety.  There was a table about wearing your bike helmet, one where you match the safety equipment to the sport, one where you learned about fire prevention and pretended to call 911, and all kinds of good information presented in kid-friendly ways.  My favorite was the Poison Control Center's game where you had to identify things as either candy or medicine.  Did you know how much a Necco wafer looks like an Alka Seltzer or a Sweet Tart looks like a Tums?  Me neither. 

Anyway, one of the tables was about sun safety and they were giving away these cool UV bracelet kits with beads that look white indoors but change colors when exposed to UV rays.  It's an easy way to tell if you need to wear sunscreen; if you see colors, the answer is "Yes!"  We made ours today and Noah is fascinated with it.  Here's how you can do the same thing.

UV BRACELET
Materials: twine, UV sensitive beads {you can find them on amazon or lots of other places}

Instructions: Cut twine and tie a knot about 1/4 of the way up to hold beads in place.  String on as many beads as you want and tie another knot.  Then, tie bracelet together.  I tied each end around the other to make it slide so that he can adjust it and slide it on and off without having to re-tie it each time.

You can see that in the house, it's totally white.

Then, we went outside to test it.  Now, here's what surprised me.  This was in total shade on our front porch.  Maybe I'm the only one who didn't know this, but there are still UV rays in what seems like complete shade!  I knew you could still get sunburned on a cloudy day, but I thought if you were in a shaded area, you were safe.  Wrong.  I was glad to know this...I have lots of moles, so I'm pretty particular about sun protection these days, both for myself and for Noah.



Out in the direct sunlight, here's how the bracelet looks.  The expression on his face totally cracks me up here...he was saying, "it's Bwoo! {blue}"

With summer fast approaching, I think this is a great craft idea for even the littlest of helpers...they think it's really interesting, and it's a good way to help convince them that they need to wear sunscreen/hats/whatever you want them to wear to protect them from the sun when the beads are colored.  For some reason, Noah doesn't balk at sunscreen when we call it "sun lotion."  Hey, whatever works, right? :) 

Speaking of sunshine, it's a beautiful day in our neighborhood; hope it's the same for you!  Have a good one!

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