Preschool Craft – Valentine Piggy Backs

This was kind of a spur-of-the-moment-craft, but I am so pleased with how cute they turned out, and M loves them!

Supplies:Pipe cleaners, googley eyes, hole punch, pencil, heart stickers, pom poms, glue, and hearts cut from sturdy cardboard (1 large, 1 small for each completed craft); I used pinking shears to cut them out for a bit of extra decoration.  Decoupaging the cardboard with scrapbook paper first, then cutting out the hearts would be super-cute too!

We ended up using a couple of extra supplies too: A craft stick broken in half, and 2 more small cardboard hearts, one for each finished craft.

Make faces on one big heart and one small heart:

Use the googley eyes, pom poms for noses, and the foam heart stickers for lips:
Punch holes on the sides of each heart for the arms.  Thread through your pipecleaners, cut to size, then twirl them around a pencil to make them curly.  Sorry there’s no photo of this step, but you’ll see how they look in photos below.

Punch holes in the extra hearts you cut out, big enough for your child’s first two fingers to go through:
and attach that heart to the bottom back of your big heart. 

As you can see in the next couple of pictures, our small hearts on the bottom did not have the finger holes in them at this point.  We ended up having to take them off to punch the holes in them, as it was just too hard to do with it all put together.

Add glue to the back of the big and little hearts that have faces on them, then attach the craft stick to hold them together, little heart guy on top, big heart guy on bottom:

Turn everything over and admire your happy little Piggy Back Valentine People:

 Aren’t they sweet?!

And this is what the holes in the bottom heart are for:

Hee hee – lots of fun! :)

I’m linking this up to Kids Get Crafty!

Have a beautiful day! :)

Science Sunday – Float or Sink

I found this fun book full of science experiments at a local thrift store:All of the ideas in this book are perfect for the pre-k to 2nd grade crowd (in my opinion), and there’s a lot of cool extension activities for the child that may want a bit more.  All of the experiments are quick and easy to do; there’s a list of what you need, and most of the time it’s stuff you already have in your home.  We are really enjoying making our way through this book! 

We’ve done the basic sink or float experiment many times since M was a very little guy and just loved playing in the kitchen sink (mostly making a mess and blessing me with the opportunity to develop my patience).  This time we made it a bit more scientific by making predictions and sorting our items out in a variety of ways.

We used a divided tray with black squares of paper taped to the bottom (it’s a Christmas tray), and M began by writing an “F” for float on one side, and “S” for sink on the other side.

We went through the house gathering items into a basket, making sure to include things made of wood, metal, paper, or plastic, with a couple of other things thrown in too (like a tangerine, which we’ll get to later).  Then M made a prediction about each item and sorted them into his tray based on whether he thought they would float or sink: I’m guessing he really just made random predictions; there didn’t seem to be any sort of consistency! ;)

We tried the “floaters” first, and he was right about most of them: 

Then we added in the “sinkers” and were surprised by quite a few things in this group actually floating, like the glass jar, and the large plastic block:

Funny thing about the jar – it floated when it was empty, but sunk when we filled it up with water! 

A similar thing happened to a folded paper towel – it floated at first, but as it got wet it sunk.

AND – some things that sink will float if they are placed on top of a large floater!

We re-organized our sorting tray so each thing was on the correct side:

Then we sorted them out into another tray according to what kind of material they were made from.  We realized anything that was metal sank.  Most of the heavy or large things sunk, unless they were filled with air; filled with air, these same things floated. We also realized that the things made from wood all floated.  A foam dart and a sponge floated too (until we squeezed all the air out of it under the water), as did most of the plastic items, except for the heavy car, which also had metal on it.

Our “floater” tray, separated by material:

See the tangerine peel?  It has air pockets in it, which make the tangerine float.  We peeled it, and the peeling floated, but the fruit sank:

And then he played:   

I think M really already knew most of what we learned in this experiment, but being more orderly about “discovering” these things really made it stick in his mind.  He had so much fun with this, and his playing at the sink warmed this mama’s heart with memories, and also made me thankful that he is not nearly as messy anymore! :)

Have a beautiful day! :)