Science Time – Celery and how Water moves through Plants

We’ve been talking a lot about leaves, trees, and plants, with interest being spurred on naturally what with all the fall going on lately. ;)

So, to add to our talks about how plants need water and how they obtain it and circulate it throughout the plant, we did a fun, quick, and fairly painless little experiment with celery.

If you want to do this, you will need a stalk of celery with leaves on it, a knife, a glass, a sunny window, water, and red food coloring. 

Make a fresh cut on the celery stalk and put it in a glass of water.  Add a few drops of red food coloring and stir it up with the celery.

Set your celery experiment in front of a sunny window (not sure this is necessary, but we did it this way) for a few hours or overnight if your child is more patient than mine.

Take the celery out of the water when you see the leaves have little red spots on them like this:M checked on it to see if it was “ready” or not several times throughout the day.

Then we sliced off a piece of the stem and took a look:You can see the “tubes” in the stalk of celery worked like straws and sucked the water up and into the leaves. 

We worked with our leaf nomenclature cards on the same day, and learned that the little tubes in the leaves are called veins.

For more science fun, check out Science Sunday!

Have a beautiful day! :)

Learning by Heart – Week 5

“The mother’s heart is the child’s schoolroom”
– Henry Ward Beecher

We are finally getting into our “rhythm” here, and it feels so great!  I’ve lightened up my own load by deciding to only do preschool activities 2 to 3 days of the week, and to do them in the mornings, which is key for us.  We are both more enthusiastic about this kind of thing in the morning, rather than in the afternoon after being busy all day.  We’ve established a sort of schedule that is really working for us.  I hesitate to use the word “schedule”… The idea of a schedule can feel stifling and for many of us just leads to feeling more pressure.  That’s not at all what I’m talking about – I want to free up time and energy and feel less stress!  Really what we are trying to do is establish good habits that make it easier for us to use our time wisely.   More on this in an upcoming post!

For now, on to what we accomplished this week:

SHELF ACTIVITIES:

D and E items for our phonics box:

dragonfly, diamond, dog, duck
(oops!  somehow only the D items made it into the photo.)

Letter Crafts:

I continue to make and print out a quick sample of the letter crafts for M to “read” and make on his own.  I do believe interest in these is waning though, so in a couple of weeks we may take a little break from these.

D is for Dragon (from No Time for Flashcards).

d is for door (from No Time for Flashcards).  Open it up to see…dots!

 

E is for Elephant (from Totally Tots).

e is for egg (from Totally Tots).
There are so many great sites out there for letter crafts, and it’s hard to think of something original.  Next week, however, I hope to have a couple of new ideas, so stay tuned!

Tonging marbles onto Dinosaur suction cups:

Dropping water into Dinosaur suction cups with a pipette: the object of this was to drop just one drop of water into each little suction cup, then use the sponge to suck the water up.  This is a very Montessori-type activity, and a great explanation of how to set it up is here.

 

Play dough and Jolanthe’s great letter mats: I recently ran across these letter mats for play dough too; I really like them, but already had the ones pictured printed out.  I think I’ll be able to use both sets for different activities.

Whiteboard letter practice:

Using Wikki Stix to form letters:

 

Sand tray with pipecleaner letters:

 

Scissor practice pages: The stickers are there to guide him and help him stay on the line.  This is way too easy for M now (he’s been using safety scissors since he was just under 2 years old).  He did one page, then wasn’t interested.  I think I need to find something a bit more challenging in this area.  He used to really enjoy these; if you are interested in them, you can find them here.

I put out some sunflowers (from Michael’s – on sale!) for M to add to his autumn leaf arrangement.  I’m amazed at how much fun it can be to stick things into a block of foam.  The result is really beautiful (see photo at the top of this post).

 

 Making Mr. Pumpkin Heads:    I wrote about these in this post, and M enjoyed making them SO much.  It was the first thing he went for the morning I put them out, and they are all hanging in his bedroom.   Last night he asked me to make more of these for him to do – I think it would be fun to try with turkeys for Thanksgiving, don’t you? :)

 

 TOGETHER ACTIVITIES: 

 Tic Tac Toe: After seeing Jolanthe’s cute-as-a-button fridge tic tac toe game (here), I got out our tic tac toe game that I made last year (free printable!) and made it into a magnet game for our fridge.  I wish I would’ve gotten some action shots, because M loved playing this game!  After a few games he was really beginning to strategize, which kind of surprised me.  We’ll be leaving this up for a while!

While I was adding magnets to things, I decided to make his name leaves magnetic too and now they are on the fridge too.  M wasn’t too interested in placing them in order, but I like how they look so they’ll be staying up too. :)

Exercise:

Since E was one of our letters for the week, I thought exercise would be a good thing to add into our week.  Honestly, I need to start making this part of our regular routine, for my sake as well as M’s!  We have a Bobby Susser cd titled, “Wiggle Wiggle and Other Exercises ".  It is so much fun, and a great addition to our days.  I plan to find a variety of cds like this, or just come up with ideas, and plan some sort of exercise each day.  M doesn’t really need this, but somebody else sure does!   

                                      Twisting and wiggling away

Marching in a circle with his hands on his head
(actions for one of the songs)

 

Math:

My big plans for math have been kind of a flop lately.  The bead bars just don’t engage M like I’d hoped.  I’m disappointed because I think the Montessori method with the bead bars and number boards makes so much sense, but it seems to only confuse M and he’s not interested in sitting and listening to me say the same thing over and over or watching me do the activity first. 

It seems to me that before we start looking at how and why the teens, twenties, and so on have two digits and what each place value is, M just wants to count.  He just wants to know the numbers and their order before we go any further.  So we’ve been doing a lot of counting (more on this next week), and I decided to make an activity that engages his whole mind and body, and ended up creating a number line game.   We played it for the first time this week.  It is very active, and a lot of fun.  I hope to give it its own post sometime soon (a printable will be included!):

Science:

We’ve been talking a lot about leaves lately, so we pulled out the leaf nomenclature cards and M matched the parts up.  He really loves this type of activity for some reason (partly because the black and white pictures with only one portion colored are interesting, and partly because he pretends he can read the big words :) ), so I hope to make more some time soon.We also did a science experiment related to this with celery, which will be in a post on Sunday. :)

I’m linking this post up to Preschool Corner and Weekly Wrap-Up; be sure to check them out!

Have a beautiful day! :)

 

Preview of this Week’s Activities

Normally I write up my preschool posts a week later than when we actually did them; this means I won’t be posting the activities for this week until the end of the first week in November.  However, with Halloween coming up this weekend, I thought I’d go ahead and share some of the Pumpkin / Halloween activities that I have planned for this week in case they interest anyone else.  :) 

We don’t do a lot for Halloween.  We carve a jack-o-lantern and go trick or treating, and that’s it.  Neither my husband nor I are into all the scary, spooky, or dark stuff, and we don’t want M to be either, especially at his age.  But, hey, who doesn’t want free candy? ;) 

Some simple and fun shelf Halloween activities I’ve set out for M:

A jack-o-lantern “go fish” type game from the October issue of High Five:

A pumpkin shadow matching game: 

The Five Little Pumpkins poem and felt pieces for our flannel board:

Mr. Pumpkin Head. :)  This one is going to be so much fun!  I cut 4 different pumpkin shapes from orange construction paper, then found some Mr. Potato head pieces to cut out.  I used this page, as well as some I found on Google Images. 

Our leaf and pumpkin tic tac toe game.  I made this last year.  You can find the printable in this post.

Pumpkin Life Cycle cards, from Montessori for Everyone:

M will sequence these in order from seed to pumpkin, then check the answer card below to see if he is right.I think M will love these sequencing cards because he is really into this book:

At the end there is a much shorter version of the pumpkin life cycle and it’s his favorite part of the book! 

To see Halloween-themed activities we’ve done in the past, visit this post.

Everyone have a safe and Happy Halloween with your little ones! :)

Have a beautiful day! :)

 

“Doing School” - week one

Matthew has been itching to “do” school for weeks now.  I’ve caught him making up his own flannel board activities, trying to draw letters, and even teaching scissor skills to some stuffed animals. :)  He’s taught himself how to spell “on” and “off”.  As in the remote control jeep is “on” and it should be “off” so the batteries don’t run down. ;)  I bet the people that put the little “off” and “on” on toys don’t realize what a teaching tool they are creating!

I’m planning 3 weeks of work at a time, then one week off to do things we didn’t get to, or to just review what we have done.  Or, you know, so when we get sick on day 2, Mommy knows we’ll have time to catch up and doesn’t stress (much).

M learned to recognize all the upper case “mama” letters before he was one year old, and he knew the sounds many of them made (he was an early talker, and hasn’t stopped since).  I thought I had a genius on my hands, let me tell you.  Turns out it was just the fascination of bath tub letters, and somehow the knowledge didn’t stick (unlike the letters, which do.  Hee hee.).  So we will be going through the alphabet, learning the shape and sound of each letter, and matching mama letters to baby letters.  I expect M will fly through this, but at first we’ll cover one letter per week, starting with A, which was this week!  Of course I have to add (because I am a mama) that my bright boy already does know many of these, so it will be a lot of reviewing too, which is always good!

Shelf Activities (semi-independent work):

Watercolor painting pictures for big A and little A (from Making Learning Fun):He only did the little A page, so the big A page went into his art box for a later time.

Poking push pins into big and little As and pictures of things that begin with A:

I found the templates for the above activity at Preschool Express in the patterns section.

Our new Autumn Sensory Bin:There’s a lot of goodies in there… pinecones, acorns, a little wooden acorn-shaped bowl, cinnamon sticks, pom poms, silk leaves, paper mache gourds and pumpkins,  sparkly orange flowers, berries (not real), and some autumn-colored lacing beads.  M thoroughly enjoyed this sensory bin.  He especially loved the cinnamon sticks.  Thank you to Mari-Ann at Counting Coconuts for many great ideas in this post!

M explored all the various items: 

Created some pinecone sculptures: 

Made a little “garden”:And we played an I spy game.  I’d say something like, “I’m looking at something very small and round and soft and fuzzy, and it’s orange.”  And he’d look everything over and guess which item I was describing (pom-pom).  We took turns describing and guessing; it was a lot of fun!

Next was a rice-pouring activity which he absolutely loved.  He poured rainbow rice (colored with a bit of rubbing alcohol and food coloring – easy peasy) from a lightweight measuring cup into these silicone cupcake liners.  The addition of candles was his idea.  We even had to light them and sing happy birthday. :)  This will be staying on the shelf till he tires of it.  He’s been doing it every day, and is really perfecting his dry pouring skills.

singing happy birthday to no one in particular

 blowing out the candles

This next activity was hands-down the favorite of the week.  The first day he spent almost 2 hours on it and he continued to get it out and work on it a bit every day.  I gave him a piece of styrofoam, some pipecleaners, wooden beads, and pony beads.  He loved the wooden beads and only used the pony beads once the wooden ones were gone.  He pushed a pipe cleaner into the foam, then strung beads onto it and pushed the other end in to make arches.  I could not believe how much he enjoyed this activity – he just loved it.  It was enough of a challenge too, because once all those beads are on, it’s not easy to push the other end of the pipe cleaner in! What a great fine motor activity:

 

I also put out some fall-themed lacing cards.  He enjoyed these much more this time than in the past.  And he concentrated on “sewing” back to front, front to back, and going to the next hole instead of across the card.  Silly Mommy forgot to take pictures , but here’s the cards:   

My husband had a lot of odd board games when he was a kid, things I have never heard of, which are now ours because his mother didn’t want to keep them.  One of them (don’t know it’s name) had this hourglass-shaped game board with wells in it, perfectly sized for pom-poms or marbles.  I set this out with the pom-poms in the bowl at first, expecting him to use the tweezers to put the pom-poms in the wells.  However, it didn’t appeal to him until I switched it around and had the pom-poms already in the wells.  He tweezed them out one by one and dropped them into the bowl.Jill, at The Shafer Family Blog has something similar to this, in her post here, that you might be able to find somewhere.  Hers is a Jello mold for little eggs or jelly-bean shapes.

 

Now for activities we did together during “school time”…

Literacy:

This is M’s new phonics box.  I found these little wooden shadow boxes at Dollar Tree, and bought 3 of them, painted them white, and wrote the letters on them.  M sorted through the basket of big and small letters and put them into the appropriate square.  Then I gave him a few small objects to put in the “Aa” square – an apple, an acorn, an anchor, and an angel:This will stay on his shelves now and each week I’ll give him new objects to put in.

We also went through this little wipe-off mat and found everything that begins with A:

Do you like the little work mat I made for M? :)

And he practiced “drawing” a mama A and a baby a on his whiteboard, which will also be staying out on his shelves indefinitely: 

 

Math:

We started working with the bead bars I made (described in this post).  M found the “one bead”, the “two bead”, etc. for me and placed them on his work mat beginning at the top and going down, so when we got to the last one, which is the “nine bead”, he could see it formed a triangle or stairs.  We’ve done similar things before, so this was mainly to get him familiar with the bead bars and their various colors. 

Then he looked at his bead triangle and colored in this “short bead stair” worksheet to match it:

What do you think of that coloring?  I’m convinced it’s never entered his mind to even try coloring within the lines.  He’s a free-thinking artist. :)

M enjoyed this activity so much, and later I found his finished worksheet hanging on the wall:This is evidence of how proud he felt. :)    

 

Science:

We planned to do a plant experiment with a carrot this week, but M was sick the 2nd day and I was sick by the 4th day, so we took it pretty easy most of the week.  We will get to it eventually, but for now we just did these tree nomenclature cards:

Although this was all vocabulary that M already knows, he enjoyed this activity, and really enjoyed “reading” the words. :)  In fact, he just looked at the letters and matched them up, but that’s good enough for now!

 

Music:

We played “music”, although I use that term loosely, since it’s mostly just making noise with instruments, and sang songs.  This is something I hope to keep up as the year goes on.  Then I showed M how he could make music with water.  He was really intrigued by this… below is a little video.  My voice sounds old and tired, but remember - I had a cold!  Also, sorry about the blurriness!

I’m linking this up to Preschool Corner and Weekly Wrap-Up.  Check them out!

Have a beautiful day! :)