For our fairy garden this year, we decided to try and make our children’s favorite stories come to life for them.
Of course, before we could build castle, a hobbit hole, and a viking village, we had to plant a garden. (more…)
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Literacy-Inspired Fairy Garden
Saturday Science: Air Pressure
With Easter being tomorrow, I thought it would be a good idea to do an egg-xperiment this week. I settled on the classic suck-an-egg-into-a-bottle experiment to demonstrate air pressure thinking it would be quick, easy, and fun. Instead LittleMan and I spent 3 hours attempting to figure out what we were doing wrong….and in the end we still couldn’t make it work!
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Toddler-Friendly Homemade Kites
Last week we had a rather blustery day outside and I wanted nothing more than to make kites with the children. The problem though is that at 5 and 2 years old, neither of my children is quite able yet to fly a proper kite. I thought back to my own childhood and remembered how one year in school we made kites from grocery bags, this seemed simple enough that even SunnyGirl could do it.
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Lazy Easter
Last year I went out of my way to try a whole slew of Easter activities and crafts which one by one all failed. There was the egg geodes which never crystallized, the Easter Island volcano which never erupted, and the new dye method which left us with white eggs. With nothing quite turning out the way it should, I declared it the Easter of FAIL.
This year I’m already in a stressful situation (see my recent series, homeschooling through crisis for more info about that) and I quite frankly didn’t have it in me to risk another Easter of FAIL so I decided to take a new approach to the holiday. The Lazy Easter approach.
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Saturday Science: Potential vs Kinetic Energy
The other day we were playing in my mother-in-law’s backyard when LittleMan grabbed a bunch of balls from the garage and threw them up onto the trampoline to bounce with him.
I couldn’t pass up the opportunity to point out to him the visual of potential energy and kinetic energy. (more…)
Child-Directed Arctic Small World Play
Last week I took LittleMan and SunnyGirl to an indoor playground and we just happen to have ordered some crackers which were served to us in a Styrofoam bowl. At home the next day, LittleMan commented that the bowl looked an awful lot like a snow-cave and went off to grab his polar bear toy. Soon he enlisted my help by asking me to make some more ice for the polar bear’s home.
Under his direction (more…)
Montessori-Inspired Star Wars Weight Cylinders
If you haven’t already seen them at your local shop, there is this uber cool line of Star Wars Easter eggs out there. We picked some up last year and have used them in various ways such as sensory play and muffin tin snacks. This time I took 8 Vader containers and made them into a set of Montessori-inspired weight cylinders.
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Saturday Science: Gravity
Back in January LittleMan and I read a library book about gravity. It started out by asking some basic questions: Which way do things fall? Have you ever seen something fall up? Then it leads children in a few easy experiments: Drop a key chain and penny at the same time, which hit the ground first? I unfortunately do not remember the name nor author of the book, I wish I did because it was brilliant and I’d love to recommend it to you.
Reading through the book just once was enough to get LittleMan curious about gravity and we’ve experimented with it several times since then.
The wonderful thing about teaching the concept of gravity is that it requires very little as far as materials go, and generally most children have some idea of what gravity (falling) feels like. (more…)
Paper Butterfly Sensory Bin
It is finally starting to feel like spring in our neck of the woods so I’m ready to put aside the snowy-day activities and get our warm weather fun on! To me spring all about the flowers and the insects and the birds. One of our favorite spring time themes is butterflies, and we’ve done quite a bit with butterflies in the past so sometimes it is hard to think of new ways to play with old themes. This bin was so super simple though, I can’t believe I never thought of it before!
The key to pulling the whole thing off was a butterfly shaped paper punch (the newest addition to my scrapbooking supplies). I simply punched out butterflies from three different colors of construction paper.
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Kitty Litter Sensory Bin Filler
I am joining up with a great group of bloggers today to bring you 40 days of sensory bin fillers. Each of us is discussing one filler everyday for 40 days straight, you can get links to all the posts in the series over at Little Bins for Little Hands.
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