Water Painting

Go outside on a warm day with a tub and a large paintbrush. Put a shallow layer of water in the tub and let the child paint with water. So easy and you couldn’t ask for easier cleanup!

Amelia was very absorbed with this activity for almost an hour. She ran around and painted the patio, gate, furniture, and toys. Then, as with most painting, she ended up painting herself and her clothing.

A little splatter painting.

I asked her what was happening to the water after it had been on the ground for a little while. I expected her to say “it dries” or the like, but she said “it’s evaporating!” We painted a line in the shade and a line in the bright sun. I asked Amelia to predict which would evaporate first, she said “I don’t know.” So I asked her if she knows why water evaporates, and she couldn’t answer. So we kept returning to check on the lines, and sure enough, the line in the bright sun was gone the fastest. I asked her how the temperature was different between the sunny and shady parts of the patio and after running between the two areas, she said “it’s colder in the shade.”  I prodded her into making a hypothesis that water evaporates more quickly when it is warm. So that’s something for us to investigate in the coming weeks! I try to use words like prediction and hypothesis because I want her science education to be firmly rooted in the scientific method from the beginning.

After we moved inside and were peeling off her wet clothes she said “can we do that again sometime?” I’d say water painting is a huge success!

Snow Play!

I have always lived in or around Las Vegas, NV, so my opportunities to play in the snow have been limited. And every time I have, I did not have the right clothes so I had no fun and was downright miserable. Now that I have Amelia, I thought we should take her up to Mt. Charleston to play in the snow. This time I did it right and bought all the appropriate clothing for both myself and Amelia, as well as some cheap disc sleds. We went with some friends who have a more appropriate vehicle – though I think our car will make the trip fine as long as there hasn’t been recent snow.

We were warm (I was too warm even and had to shed a layer) and stayed dry, so I can definitely say this was the most fun I’ve ever had in the snow! Amelia went down the hill on the sled with me and really enjoyed herself. I was busy with children and playing, so didn’t really have my camera out much. This is the best I can do!

That's me and Amelia going down the hill on a sled!

Look forward to going maybe another time this season and a few times each year!

Valentinesing

Amelia calls exchanging valentines “valentinesing.” I think she got this from “treating” as in “trick-or-treating.” So on Sunday, we went to a Valentine’s Day party for some valentinesing, and took these cute valentines to give to Amelia’s friends.

Take the paper off short, old crayons and break them into smaller pieces if necessary. I had to borrow some old crayons from my mom because the only short crayons we have are blue – go figure. Amelia loves peeling crayons and she liked breaking them too, so she was a big help with this. I had read that soaking crayons in water really helps with peeling, and was planning to soak them. Amelia came up with the idea all on her own though. She ran into the bathroom and put a crayon under running water before I even mentioned soaking. When I asked what she was doing, she told me that “water will help the paper come off.” What a smart idea!

After the crayons are all peeled and broken, put the pieces into a silicone muffin tray and melt in a 250 F oven for about 10 minutes. Take the tray out carefully and let cool  before popping the shapes out – the freezer cools them very quickly.

Then we printed a valentines day card that I got from here and Amelia wrote a big A on the back of each card.

I finished her name and added the names of her friends and attached the crayons to the front with duct tape.

Happy Valentinesing!

Counting beads onto pipe cleaners

I set up this activity by hot gluing laminated numbers onto the ends of pipe cleaners. Then I set out our bead container and asked Amelia to put the appropriate number of beads on each pipe cleaner.

The most difficult part of this activity was using her fine motor skills, but even that wasn’t too hard. She picked the number 8 first (because apparently 8 is her favorite number), and it took her a long time to get all the beads onto to pipe cleaner.

This immediately seemed very tedious to me and I kind of regretted putting it together, thinking to myself that Amelia will never finish this in one sitting, she’ll get bored very quickly! I was very wrong, Amelia quite enjoyed this work. I asked her after she finished each pipe cleaner if she’d like to stop, and she said no.  She worked persistently until everything was finished.

I wish I had had enough identical wood beads to finish this activity, but Amelia didn’t seem to mind using a different kind of bead for 7 and 9.

Henderson Parks Tour: Update

In 2010/2011 I took Amelia to every public park in our city of Henderson. See my blog post about it here.

Well, since then Silver Springs Park has finished being renovated and there are 2 new parks, so I thought I’d just continue adding to my sign pictures.

Silver Springs Park – reopened November 2011

Reunion Trails Park – opened December 2011

Hidden Falls Park – opened January 2012

All very beautiful parks as we have come to expect.

Froggy Gets Dressed story prop

Back when I was doing Book of the Week (it just got a bit tedious for me), I wrote about Froggy Gets Dressed. When I came across these printables, I thought it might be time to request the book again from the library.

These were fun, and Amelia had some great pretend play time with Froggy, his mom, and the bed. The clothes were less used because I couldn’t figure out a way to keep them on Froggy so that she could move him around while dressed. I tried some Scotch removable strips because they were recommended by a woman from whom I bought some paper dolls (haven’t printed those out yet), but they were too strong even for the heavy-weight paper. Especially for this particular story where the clothes come off and on and off and on repeatedly.

Oh, if you are wondering about the bathing suit – Amelia is so excited to go back to the pool/splash pads! She wants to put on a bathing suit and swim diaper (even though she doesn’t need one any more) all the time, even when it is freezing cold!

Marble and cereal painting

This was fun, fun, fun! You can’t really see it in the picture, but Amelia has a giant marble that she insisted upon using. I tried to tell her that it would make the tub too heavy for her to move easily and she asked “why?” So I rethought my position and allowed her to use the big marble. As she was moving it around she said “see Mommy, I am strong!” Yes she is.

She also said repeatedly “these are really neat designs.”

Oh, and when we started our 4th marble painting Amelia said she wanted to “roll at the same time.” I didn’t quite catch her drift until she lay down on the floor and started rolling around. She insisted that I continue to shake the marbles as she rolled down the hall and back. Everytime I stopped shaking, she’d yell “keep rolling the marbles!”

After we were done with the marble painting, Amelia told me she wanted to “paint with cereal.” My first response was “uh, what?” It was close to bed time, I had just cleaned up the marble painting, and I didn’t quite understand how she could paint with cereal. But I decided not to shoot her idea down, so I put a few pieces of cereal into her pallete along with the required blue paint.

First she just tried to use the tiny cereal pieces like a brush.

She shortly proclaimed “this doesn’t work very well.” I thought, “good let’s get ready for bed now,” but instead said “how else might you paint with cereal?” So she tried shaking the cereal around on the paper.

This was also disappointing to her so she finally decided to plunk all the cereal down into the paint to coat, then put it down on the paper. After a bit, she remembered doing our mirror string prints, and tried to do something similar with the cereal.

She did this again and again and again. She kept saying things like “this is sooo much fun. I love this.”  And “I’m working really hard.”  And “this was a great idea!” I hated to break it up for bedtime, but I promised we’d do more the next day.

0-10 cards

Montessori Print Shop has many free, beautiful printables! I printed off and laminated these cards to use with Amelia and she quite liked them.

I started off with just the dot and numeral 0-5 cards (we’ll save the words for later), but this was very easy for Amelia.

You can tell she's smiling here - she really did enjoy working with these cards!

Then I tried the 6-10 cards. She can count the dots to 7, but has trouble counting the cards with 8, 9, and 10 dots on them because the dots aren’t in a straight line. Her one-to-one correspondence skills are mostly quite good; it’s like when an adult is trying to count fish in an aquarium – you lose track of those you have already counted. I’m trying to teach her some strategies for remembering which dots she’s already counted, but a concept like grouping or sectioning dots is mostly over her head. Maybe I’ll try giving her a marker so she can mark each dot as she’s counting. After she has correctly counted the dots, matching the numeral isn’t a problem.

The printable also comes with objects to count, instead of dots, but I haven’t tried those yet.

Crystal Soil Sensory Tub

This was an amazing sensory experience for both Amelia and me. “Crystal soil” is sold as these tiny little balls that expand greatly when soaked in water for around 4 hours.

Before

After

I think they are meant as a medium to grow plants hydroponically, but they are so much fun to mess around with. They even bounce a bit!

She was a little concerned about the few balls that were broken.

The thought has crossed my mind to buy enough of them to fill a bathtub so we can get our whole body surrounded. I bought this batch when it was on sale; this quantity cost me $4.50. $75 should do it….I think I’m crazy. But this stuff is really neat.

Color Mixing Handprints

I tried this project not really knowing how Amelia would take to it. Sometimes she’s really squeamish about having gooey stuff on her hands, but she thoroughly enjoyed this. Maybe because we washed her hands off a lot. I got out paints in the three primary colors and asked Amelia to pick two. She chose blue and red to start, and I painted one hand blue and one hand red.

Then she made a handprint of each color.

And then rubbed her hands together to make: purple.

Next she chose blue and yellow and we repeated each step.

With only a bit of prodding she did the mix with no blue – red and yellow.

Finally, she wanted to see what would happen with all three colors. I was really pleased with this, because like I said, Amelia has been really squeamish about having stuff on her hands. She never liked fingerpainting and always preferred to use a brush or some other tool. To my delight, she really enjoyed using her hands this time – I think it might be time to try fingerpainting again.

I hung up her handprints next to her easel with the hope that maybe someday she’ll be painting and use them as a sort of key. I started asking her “what happens when you mix blue and yellow?” and she runs over to her paintings to look for the answer.

This idea came from Teach Preschool.