Fairy Treasure: Painted Pinecones

If the kids are lucky and the weather is nice, we often try to squeeze in a "Pajama Walk" just before bedtime.


We change the kids into their jammies like usual, but before they climb into bed, we announce "Pajama Walk!" and herd them downstairs and out the door.

O, joy! O happiness! Bedtime; delayed! Mama and Dad-Dad are the BEST!


We throw the kids into the stroller with some blankets and lucky stuffies and off we go - around the block or down to the field for a 30 minute stroll. If they're super-lucky, cookies and juice may be involved... but this is a bit more rare.

Dusk is a curious and interesting time, and during these walks, the kids are usually very mellow and observant of nature and the sounds of the woods around them. They know they're on borrowed time, so they don't squabble and fidget, and are generally more pleasant to be around than they have been for the proceeding 12 hours. O, if only it could always be like this!

Two extra benefits of the Pajama Walk are that the evening air tires the kids right out, and I'm able to squeeze in some bonus exercise. I highly recommend the Pajama Walk. I also highly recommend bringing bug spray.

Last night, we went for our evening walk, but didn't bother with pjs because I knew the kids were just too rambunctious to stay sleepily inside the stroller. We explored an old overgrown path, and the children ran up and down the woody lane, collecting mini pinecones and tossing them into the stroller. By the time we headed home, we had a collection of 30-40 small pinecones.

Although I generally prefer to leave natural items intact and appreciate them for what they are, both of the children have been on a "fairy kick" for a few weeks, and I thought maybe we could use these pinecones to do something special for our fairies. I washed them gently to remove mud and bugs, and spread them out to dry overnight.

This morning I took a deep breath and broke out the sacred Acrylic Paint for the first time with the children!

Acrylic paint is some serious business. It has the potential to look great, has much thicker coverage than children's poster paints, comes in a beautiful assortment of colors, and is able to be more gracefully manipulated with a paint brush. However, acrylic is a little difficult to scrub off of skin and surfaces once dry, and god forbid you get it on your clothes - you'll just be living with that streak of paint, forever.

The kids did pretty well, and were both very careful with their paintbrushes...

until Mommy wandered off to grab some drying trays, and came back to find this:

"Look, Mama! I's PINK!"

The pinecones themselves were coming out pretty well - the acrylic covered them beautifully.

And if you're going to paint something for the fairies, well, you best get out the glitter, as well. Mama was only brave enough to allow one messy activity today, so I managed the dispersal of the glitter with an iron fist.

We had to allow the pinecones to dry for a few hours, but soon we had a beautiful little assortment of glimmering fairy treasures! Fairies love anything that sparkles, don't ya know? So we left these pretty little fairy toys in a basket beside our Fairy House, for the fairies to discover when they come home tonight.  

We also also plan on using them to play a kind of Easter egg hunt game in the grass. The kids adore any type of hide-and-seek game, and I know this will be a bit hit.

Caps for Sale: book + activity

This week I received a donation of a collection of miniature straw hats.

They came in an assortment of sizes, and I was able to add a few of my own; a child-size hat and some super-small hats from a dollhouse collection. 

Now... what in the world to do with them....?

I did some digging, and was lucky enough to locate an oversize classroom edition of Caps for Sale at the library. Dandy!

Caps for Sale is the story of a peddler who wears his wares atop his head while carefully walking around town. One day, he falls asleep beneath a tree with all of his caps piled high, but awakens to find the caps missing! A hoard of naughty little tree monkeys has stolen the caps, and they remain high up in the tree where the peddler can't reach.

As the peddler grows angrier and angrier with the stubborn monkeys, he finally throws down his only remaining cap in despair - causing each tree monkey to throw down his own cap, in mimicry.

This is a good story - it's short, but with just the right amount of repetition to pull the children in. Plus: naughty monkeys!

Before we began the story, I asked the children if they knew what a Cap was. The 4.5 year old explained to us that "a cap is what they used to call hats, back in the olden days". Well done, Sir.

For the other children, ages four, two and a half, and two years old, Cap was a new vocabulary word.

Storytime happens in the grass, whenever possible.

After we finished the story, I brought out our set of straw caps, and the children were very excited to each be handed one. I asked them to wear their hats like the peddler in the story, and walk across the yard so carefully that the cap wouldn't fall off his or her head.

This activity encourages the children to practice patience, precision, grace, and physical coordination.

Because of their ages, I didn't make any "no hands" rules. It was hard enough for the 2-year olds to keep the caps on their heads while being allowed to hold onto them with both hands. But the 4-year olds walked very carefully and slowly, and had few accidents.

Hold on! Storm's a-brewin'!

Each time the children returned to me, I handed them another cap to stack on top and try to walk with. The 4.5 year old successfully carried 5 caps up on top, and was very proud of himself!

Sometimes it's hard to go slow!!!

This was a very quick activity, no more than 15 minutes from start to finish, including the story.

You can find miniature straw hats in bulk on Amazon here, on craft supply stores like the one here, and I was also able to find many large sets available for around $10 each, on eBay.

Our donated hats had been quickly painted in an assortment of acrylic colors. I do recommend painting them, as the colors of the caps are mentioned repeatedly throughout the book.

You can have your children do the painting themselves, and make it part of your program.

Allow at least an hour for drying time, although they may be ready significantly sooner - acrylic is a very fast-drying paint.  Just take note that acrylic paint will stain clothing, so pull out the aprons and smocks. Or, let them paint naked and be free spirits!

I recommend Golden Acrylic Paints. They're a small, local manufacturer but have excellent reviews and worldwide distribution. I always used Golden Paints for my college artwork.

If you're artistically minded, you might enjoy playing around with the Golden Virtual Paint Mixer gadget, but I digress.

This is an excellent and very simple children's book + game, and would suit the needs of children's librarians quite nicely.

Science Experiment: Water Displacement

 

Patrick asked us this week, "How come the water in the bathtub gets bigger when I get in?" We briefly explained the idea of water displacement, and decided to make it into the next afternoon's science experiment, so he could see it in a few different forms.

THE SUPPLIES:

A clear measuring cup

1 Wide rubber band

A bottle of water

An assortment of small, medium, and large items

THE PROCESS: 

Put the rubber band around the measuring cup at about the halfway point. Fill your measuring cup with water, up to the rubber band line.

Have the children notice the difference between the bottom half of the cup and the top half (water + air). Next, point out that the water line is in the same spot as the rubber band line. Show them that even if you tilt the measuring cup to either side, the water will go back to it's line on the rubber band, when righted. 

Explain to them that when you put an object into the water, the water has to "move over" to make room for that object. 

For example, Patrick's body is a large object, so when Patrick's body enters the bathtub, a lot of water has to move over and make room for him. The water moves up the side of the tub.

Show them a small collection of objects - stones, shells, beads, marbles, buttons, pennies, and ask them what would happen if we added this one small thing to our water? Would the water "move over" for it? Would the water move over a lot, or a little bit? Where will the water move to?

Drop your single item into the water to show that the water did move - but just barely. Perhaps it's still on the rubber band line. Now ask the children to predict what would happen if all of these objects went into the water? What would the water do? Give each child a pile of the small objects, and have everyone pour them into the water. Examine the location of the waterline, and how it has changed. 

Remove the small stones (or whatever you're using), and move up to a larger object. I used a medium sized bottle, next. 

Help the children to notice that the water level retreated back to the rubber band when you removed the stones, and ask them to predict what will happen to the water line when you add your medium sized object. 

The waterline rose almost to the top.

The kids should have a pretty good grasp of water displacement by now. 

Remove your medium object and show them a large object - something that will take up nearly all of the space in your measuring cup. Have them predict what will happen to the water if you put this very large object into it. Where will the water go if it runs out of measuring cup? 

The large object I chose was a mason jar. 

 

The 4.5 year old was excited to accuratly predict that the rising water would gush out of our measuring cup and spill all over the tray. I let him put the mason jar into the water to prove his theory. It worked!

Finally, I handed out 2-cup measuring cups to each child and filled them most of the way with water. The kids had some free-exploration time and ran around the yard gathering pinecones and little balls and whatnot to drop into their cups so they could see what it did to their water. 

Careful, Little Dude! You're thinking too hard!

This was a super-quick program, and fun for the kids. It only took about 10 minutes to do, and everyone caught on quickly. A day later, they could explain what they'd seen, but they still couldn't quite articulate why it'd happened. 

haha... oh well. I tried!

 

Hummingbirds

Today seemed like a good day to learn about Hummingbirds!

It was bright and sunny and beautiful outside, so we did our program while lying in the shady grass under the mostly-built picnic table! 

I started by handing out some cards with illustrations of Hummingbirds on them.

Each card had between one and three birds on it, and each child ended up with two cards. We counted our birds to see who had the most Hummingbirds in their hand (counting and comparing quantities), then talked about what the Hummingbirds looked like. The children noticed the long bill, so I told them about how the Hummingbird needs his long bill to suck nectar from deep within flowers.

I love Vintage school books, and was finally able to use one of my favorites. From Fins to Feathers is an early Primer from 1965, with illustrations dating back to 1935. So it is quite beautiful and awesome to look at, and it smells like a lovely old library book! (Someone needs to invent Old Library Book perfume!)

Anyway, the passage we read was three short pages in length, and comprised of some interesting information about Hummingbirds, with reading comprehension questions afterwards.

Books of animal facts are usually so boring for this age level (2-4 years), because they're always so full of NUMBERS, and the children really have no concept of what you're yapping about. But thankfully, this bit of text wasn't bogged down with numbers and statistics. At one point, when the weight of the bird was mentioned, I made an "aside" to the children that this is about the equivalent of a penny.  

I passed around one penny for each child to hold, and had them close their eyes and imagine that this was a dainty little Hummingbird siting on their palm. We talked about how it hardly weighed anything at all.

A few paragraphs later, the text explained to us that Hummingbird nests are very small and hard to spot - that they're only about as big as half a walnut shell. I didn't have any walnut shells handy, but I did have an actual seashell that was about the same size, so I passed this around to the children, to imagine as a nest with itty bitty tiny little eggs inside. 

After we read those three pages of information about how the Hummingbird flies, what it eats, why it's called a Hummingbird, how it makes it's nest, and what it's eggs look like, I began asking the reading comprehension questions.

I've never attempted reading comprehension questions with the kids, before, but it went very well. Stopping the reading to give them concrete examples of what we'd just read about really helped them retain the information. They flew through the reading comprehension questions without a problem.

Next, we pulled out our DK Publishing Eyewitness BIRDS book and looked at the actual photograph of the hummingbird's nest with eggs inside, laid side-by-side with other bird nests and eggs, as a size comparison. I love DK Publishing's Eyewitness books, and refer to them frequently. They're like photographic encyclopedias of everything a child would ever want to learn about.

We watched a YouTube video of Hummingbirds gathering around a bowl of sugar-water, and asked the children if they wanted to know what that yummy-looking fake nectar tasted like. So we followed a simple recipe to make our own Hummingbird water. We added orange food coloring because we'd read that Hummingbirds are attracted to red and orange because it reminds them of the flowers with the tastiest nectar. 

Hummingbird Water:

1 Cup white sugar
4 Cups water
Food coloring

Bonus!

"Cooking" outside means I don't have to wipe up any spills! 

We use Wilton food colorings. It's much more vibrant than any other grocery-store bought dyes.

After we whipped up our concoction, I gave each of the boys a tiny cup to dip into the water. They tried drinking it with the tips of their tongues, in imitation of the Hummingbirds with their long bills and tongues. 

My kids have never tasted Kool Aid and only drink juice at an 80% water/ 20% juice solution, so I wasn't sure how they were going to react to this! Haha... This part was MY experiment!

Let it breathe. Then hold it... and savor...

Once the little guy got a taste of the water, he gulped it down and plunged
back in for more. I had to cut him off. :)

I thought they'd be a little grossed out that it didn't taste orangey or tropical like the color suggests, but they all went crazy for it. I had to cut them off, pull the bowl out of their hands, and pour the extra down the drain!

I guess no backyard Hummingbird feeders for us, after this! They'd probably be sucking from it the moment my back was turned!

This was a fun program, and really only took about 30 minutes from start to finish, so it was a nice quick lesson on a great sunny day when running about is much more important than book work. Afterwards, the kids were able to recognize the Hummingbird in our photographic lineup of about 15 local birds that we're hoping to see over this spring and summer.

The Non-Volcano Baking Soda and Vinegar Experiment

Every day, when we go on our walk, the children always run ahead to check on their favorite attraction - three hollowed out stumps that they pretend are volcanoes filled with hot liquid lava. They go on and on about the volcanoes and the lava inside (and also the crocodiles and dinosaurs! It's a very dangerous place!). So today I finally decided to try out Ye Ol' Science Standby: the Baking Soda and Vinegar Volcano.

Except... after I had the volcano books gathered together and an actual plastic volcano in which to conduct our experiment, something just didn't sit right with me.

To put it quite simply, the top layer of the Earth is made up of land. The inner layer is liquid lava. The ring of land upon the surface of the Earth basically glides on top of this ball of lava at the center of the Earth. When our plate tectonics move, creating gaps or crashing into each other, lava is forced out of the center of the earth and up through passageways in the land. Topside, we call those passageways volcanoes.

So... if I'm going to explain volcanoes to 4-year olds, I'm going to want to do something along those lines. And maybe I need to do more research, but it seems to me that the chemical reaction between Baking Soda and Vinegar, although super-cool, has very little to do with the process of actual volcanic eruptions, other than symbolically.

So instead of talking about volcanoes, we ran today's experiment as an observation of chemistry, only. I didn't even mention volcanoes until afterwards, and when I did, I explained them in the terms outlined above.

Working with four children between the ages of 2 and 4, I prepared four sets of materials.

These cups are so handy. They came from our set of Sorting Bears and we use them for everything. Here, they each contained about 3 Tablespoons of baking soda per round.

Reused apple sauce cups hold all the small bits and pieces of our experiments. Here, they're the perfect size for our vinegar. I love that they're clear - it really helped us see the chemical reaction that took place inside.

In front of each child, I placed a tray with a bowl of baking powder, a cup of vinegar, and a bottle of food coloring, just for fun. I told them that I wasn't going to give them any directions - that this was an experiment they would do themselves, however they wanted to. It was really interesting to watch them work without narrating through the whole project, or allowing them to defer to me for guidance.

"Aaaaand.... GO!"

At first, everyone lept for the squeeze bottles of food coloring and saturated their cup of vinegar with it. They giggled and exclaimed about the clouds of color floating in their "water".

Suddenly, one of the four year olds caught a whiff of his water and realized that it wasn't water at all.

This caused them to immediately questioned the validity of the "sugar" beside it. Finally, someone thought to pour the two ingredients together and Wow! - that was something!

They thought they broke the experiment! The kids jumped back from the table, not sure how big those bubbles were going to get. After the "danger" had passed, the other three quickly followed suit, and we had a showcase of four simultaneous rainbow-colored fizzy bubbly chemical reactions.

Now the kids were full of questions! -- Which is right where I wanted them.

My philosophy of education is to (as best I can), build curiosity in the children through hands-on experiences until they're stampeding for more answers. As they grow older, I'll introduce them to research, and we'll find our answers together. Today, this is the explanation I gave them about the reaction that occurred in their cups (it's terribly simplified for use at the Pre-K level). Earlier in the day, while they were napping, I'd drawn up a few cards to illustrate what I was going to say to them:

"Your baking soda is a special kind of powder, made up of chemicals. 

"Your vinegar is a special kind of liquid, made up of other chemicals.

"When we put that powder and that liquid together, their chemicals get so excited that they move around and bounce off each other so fast, they actually heat up and turn into a third thing: Something entirely new that isn't a powder or a liquid, but a gas - just like clouds are gas, and the air we breathe out is gas! Every one of those bubbles in your fizz is full of gas that you made."*

*<insert joke here about the gas children make. Tee hee.>

We repeated the experiment two more times, and excitingly, one of the children was able to create this awesome huge super-strong bubble, which helped bring home the concept of the bubbles being filled up with gas. The bubble slowly grew larger and larger, and lasted for about 5 minutes before it finally popped.

At the end of the day, the four year olds were familiar with the words baking soda and vinegar, and to a lesser extent, gas and chemicals. They were able to explain to another adult the process we used to achieve our chemical reaction, and best of all, they were passionate and excited about their discoveries.

Perhaps hoping for a similarly exciting result, at dinner this evening, my two year old daughter kept asking me excitedly, "What would happen if I mixed my ketchup with my salad dressing, Mommy? What would happen???"

<3

The Matching Bag Game

 I found this awesome idea over at Amy's Cooking Adventures.

It was so simple to throw together, and is comprised of found-objects so it's primarily free (until you run out of paper bags)! The kids loved it so much that they've been begging to play it again.

I had a feeling this one would be very popular, so I prepared tons of bags - enough for each of the four children to open one or two bags per round, and we played about 5 rounds. That sounds like a lot, but when we ran out of bags, they were all sad the game had already come to an end!

SUPPLIES:
Paper lunch bags
Stapler
A bunch of items from around the house - in sets of two

A few of the objects we used:

• Matchbox cars
• Mini straw hats
• Crayons
• Spoons
• Bananas
• Cotton balls
• Jars of baby food
• Two handfuls of KIX cereal
• Two handfuls of marbles
• Apples 
• Canned vegetables
• Jingle bells
• Rubber ducks
• Plastic cups
• Oranges

DIRECTIONS:
Lay out four paper bags on a tray. Using one pair of items, set one object on the tray and tuck the other inside a paper bag. Fold over the edge and staple it closed. When you present the tray to your students, they will see four paper bags with hidden objects inside, and four possibilities on the tray. They must each pick a bag and infer the identity of their object, using their senses and deductive reasoning.

I encouraged my group to describe the object they felt or perceived in their bag, before they were allowed to rip into it.  

They weren't allowed to just say "It's a muffin!" -- they had to say "I think it's a muffin because: it's squishy and I can poke it, and it smells like blueberries!" 

Some descriptive questions to help your children draw conclusions:

• Does it feel round or flat? 
• Is it heavy or light?   
• Does it make a sound?
• Does it have a smell? 
• How big does it seem? 
• Is it squishy or hard?

Since this was our first time playing the game, I made each round fairly easy - there was always a heavy object, always a light object, always a long and skinny object, and always an object that made sound.

As the children grow more comfortable with paying attention to the small details of their hidden objects, I plan to make each round harder by having each bag contain very similar objects, or the same objects in different quantities.

Bag #1: 1 marble
Bag #2: 2 marbles
Bag #3: 3 marbles
Bag #4: 4 marbles

(or)

Bag #1: Cotton balls
Bag #2: Cotton swabs
Bag #3: Feathers
Bag #4: a doll pillow or small potpourri pack

The four year olds were very good at figuring out their mystery objects, and the two year olds had a blast tearing into their bags like it was Christmas morning!

I think we'll be playing this game quite a bit. It teaches them to slow down and notice details, and to verbalize why they're drawing a certain conclusion. 

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