We love reading books and exploring them further, it's one of our favourite ways to play as it's always a great starting point for so many questions and investigation.  One of Ethan's favourite stories has always been How to Catch a Star by Oliver Jeffers.  It's such a sweet and playful book about a little boy who wants a star of his own.

In the story the little boy tries and tries to catch a star, and eventually sees one in the water but isn't able to pick it up.  It's at this point in the story that Ethan and I started to discuss whether or not there really is a star in the water, or if it is a reflection of a star in the sky.  So we set up a little reflection pool of our own to see what we could find out.  We used a tray, foil, water and a plastic star to see what we could find out.


We started by reading the story, then I covered the tray in foil and Ethan helped to pour water into the tray.  Then we started by holding our star up above the tray as if it were in the sky, to see what we would see in the water.  And of course we could see the star reflected in the foil.


To see the reflection more clearly, and to see if the star would float in the water Ethan wanted to put it in.  So he put the star into the water and we were able to see that it did float and there was a very clear reflection of it in the foil.


Finally, we were talking about the star washing up on the shore and the waves and currents in the water that would make that happen.  So we had fun tipping the tray up to make our own little waves and move the star from one side to the other.


There is so much to explore in this wonderful story, I am sure that it will lead to more discovering very soon!


This post is part of the Storybook Science series hosted by Inspiration Laboratories!  Check out all of the fun science activities related to books!



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