Science – Sink or Float & Magnetic or Non-Magnetic

I’ve been trying to have a morning activity ready for M when he wakes each day.  If I don’t he wanders around whining “what can I dooooo???”, and at that time of day it can be a very dangerous thing to whine anywhere near Mama.

So one day this past week I set this out for him:

It’s a basic sink or float activity, and he had to guess what each object would do before he placed it in the water.  He was right about 95% of the time. 

Then, I told him some of the items were magnetic and that he could find them by using his little fishing pole (from our homemade ABC fishing game).  He LOVED this and spent a good 25 minutes fishing things out and then putting them back in to fish out again. :) 

This idea came from this post at The Wonder Years.

Next time we do this (and I’m sure we will be doing this again), we’ll do some sort of graphing activity… floats/magnetic, floats/non-magnetic, sinks/magnetic, sinks/non-magnetic… is what I’m imagining. 

This time he just sorted them into a pile of magnetic things and left the non-magnetic things in the water.

Check out Science Sunday for more kids’ science!

Have a beautiful day! :)

Books of the Week – 5/15/10

Our top two favorites this week…

Little Bear’s Visit, by Else Minarik:I just can’t say enough good things about these Little Bear books – they are even better than I remember from when I was a child!  In this one Little Bear visits Grandfather Bear and Grandmother Bear, and gets a story from each one.  One story is about when Mother Bear was little and made friends with a little robin.  The other story is about a gremlin who has magic shoes. :)  M asks for this every day at least once.  It’s quite long – 4 chapters – and he sits for the entire thing, even the 2 pages where there are no pictures! 

His other favorite this week was Big Brown Bear’s Up and Down Day, by David McPhail(thanks, Kim!) : This is a cute story about a rat trying to get Big Brown Bear to give up one of his slippers so he can use it for a bed.  But M loves this book mainly because there is a little toy car in it that winds up and goes, and the rat gets to drive it at the end. :)   

This is being linked to Mouse Grows, Mouse Learns, and Feed Me Books Friday.  Check out both of these great sites for more book recommendations!

Have a beautiful day! :)