Celebrate "The Dot" and F is for fog

Happy International Dot Day!...what is this, you may ask?  On September 15th they have International Celebrate "The Dot" day.  "The Dot" is a book by Peter H. Reynold that we first discovered at the Public Library in Nebraska and its so cool it even has its own holiday, really.  It really is the coolest thing ever...even astronauts in space celebrate "The Dot", how cool is that! So we celebrated "The Dot" all week long.
The book is all about encouraging creativity and making your own mark.  So I gave the boys a small piece of paper, told them they had 5 seconds to make their mark on the page.  I counted to five and they made their marks.  Big brother's mark didn't surprise me at all, when he was 18 months old he was already drawing circles all over his art work.  It just fit.  (Next time I won't let little brother see older brother's mark before he does his own as he just copied him...lesson learned)
We then took their marks and did a few other projects expanding on their original idea.  We used crayons, markers and paint and set up this little art display for dad to see when he got back from his business trip.

This past week we also focused on the letters F, L and T (Fall, Leaf and Tree).  We went on a nature walk and collected leaves with different colors and shapes.  We came home and examined them, traced over them and did comparisons (putting them in different groups based on size, then color and then shape)
We made the shape of our letters and associated Leaves Falling from Trees with some art.  One morning there was fog outside and I mentioned that fog started with the letter F...strangely they remembered that better than anything else this week.  When I would ask "what letter starts with F" (wanting them to say "fall") they would proudly declare "FOG!"  Oh well, that is correct.  We ended the week with a science experiment dealing with Paper Chromatography.  We collected leaves and the boys cut them up into little pieces with some plastic knives.  We put them in alcohol and placed a strip of coffee filter paper in the water and attempted to pull the separate pigments from the leaves.  This was the website that I used for the lab:

http://www.education.com/activity/article/Leaves_Change_fifth/?cid=50.200

We were only able to pull chlorophyll a and b from the leaves we didn't see Xanthophyll or Carotene...next time we try I will blend up the leaves to get a better pulp.  It was a fun project though.